Close Encounters 8
by chezchuckles
Summary: From Russia With Love. Spy Castle and Beckett save the world one mission at a time - starting at a nuclear reprocessing plant in Russia.
1. Chapter 1

**Close Encounters 8: From Russia With Love**

* * *

**Be Advised**: This first chapter contains adult themes - strong language, sexual situations, and extreme violence.

Just, you know, lie back and think of England.

* * *

Kate Beckett - now known as Sasha to her sighing amusement (and to his, if he were here) - slid the clove cigarette from the pack and tapped the end against the cafe table. Her new friend, Vadim, gave her another of his cold, calculating looks - his face had the cruel set to his mouth that made her wish she had back up.

But she didn't.

He had strong fingers, and they even now curled over her wrist and gripped too hard as she held the cigarette; Vadim brought her hand up between them, the stained clove stick like a flag of surrender.

Because she was Sasha, and not Beckett, she whimpered and pressed her thigh to his, let her eyes turn soft and pleading.

His Russian was so colloquial, and mixed liberally with Ukranian, that she always had to listen intently to him when he spoke - and he liked that, he liked it a lot - which gave her the chance to lean in close. Vadim brought the lighter up and struck it with a flare of similar heat in his eyes, only his was animal and base and spoke of whips and scars.

Sasha opened her mouth and let him place the cigarette between her lips, but Kate took a shallow, feigned drag from the unfiltered end and tried not to let the smoke crawl back down her throat.

He saw through her in a moment, and his grip around her wrist tightened.

"You're not smoking, baby doll."

Baby doll wasn't quite the right translation for the name he was using. Not bitch either - bitch held too much rancor in the English language. What he called her was something along the lines of 'rich whore' but with an entirely mellow connotation. Almost like a gift. He'd heard the privileged schooling of her accent, and nothing could dissuade him from thinking she had a millionaire daddy in Moscow.

Vadim was enjoying despoiling daddy's little girl.

"It tastes bad," she said finally, letting Sasha come through with the downturned lips, like a pout, and the fringe of her lashes hiding the very _Kate _roll of her eyes.

"Clove is good." His fingers gripped tighter. "You smoke it, Sasha. I paid money for that."

She wasn't about to. Beckett stubbed it out against the inside of his wrist with a streak of stupidity, but he only growled like the hardened beast he was and smiled at her.

And then he released her wrist and calmly backhanded her across the face.

Sasha fell off the narrow metal cafe chair and to the cold concrete, a hand up to her cheek. It pulsed hot and she felt the broken skin, the slick of blood, but it soon stopped, dammed by the freezing Russian air. "You big brute."

"You liked it," he drawled and righted her chair. "Just as you enjoyed putting that out on my skin, you bitch. Now come up here with me."

And because it was her damn mission, she got to her knees on the crumbling cafe pavement, leaned forward so that her arms were braced on her empty chair and her fingertips trailing along his knee.

"Up there with you?" she teased. "Looks to me like you'd rather me stay down here." Sasha lifted her lashes and curled her lips prettily and let her fingers run up the inside of his thigh.

He grabbed her hand and his eyes were hard and glittering. "Can't do that out here, baby doll."

"Where can we?" she breathed out. This was it. Four days of getting close to this foul-smelling factory foreman and he might finally take her somewhere _private._ Like his office inside that factory.

"Your place?" he suggested.

She shook her head and pouted. "No, I told you, Vadim. The landlord - she is super religious. I'll get kicked out. What about your place?"

"My fucking brother." He got that same disgruntled look on his face. "Get up here, you slut."

Sasha rose to her feet with another pout, but fuck, her face was pounding. Harder than last time, and where it could be seen as well.

At least Castle wasn't here. She'd gone on ahead of him to this small Russian industrial town to get the inside information they needed about the plant Vadim managed, and she wasn't sure when Castle would join her, but she just wanted to be able to do this one job. One fucking job.

If Vadim ever got the balls to invite her to his office.

* * *

Sasha was freezing cold, her thigh muscles quivering with it as she waited in the shadow of a doorway. The town of Mayak was an industrial complex dedicated to one thing: the nuclear power plant at the outskirts. It was situated on a lake, and the government had long covered up the terrible disasters that had happened here, but it wasn't the power plant she was after.

It was Vadim and his work at the nuclear reprocessing plant.

He was in league with terrorists (they were almost certain of it) and all she needed was to get in his office, get the information, and get out. She'd been here six days already, and she had the bruises and bitterness to prove it.

Hell, if Castle walked in right now, she'd probably be pissed at him too. Start a fight just for the hell of it.

She seethed with a feminine rage for all the other women Vadim had terrorized, and even though this was her own damn choice, even though she was always in control, the feeling of being sadistically tortured, demeaned, and brutalized was sharp enough that sometimes. . .

Beckett shook her head and shivered in the darkness. Sasha. She was Sasha and when the job was over, she'd never be Sasha again.

It was just a job.

And at that moment, out of the darkness came his voice calling her, the Russian already slurred with vodka but no less sharply horrifying. Fuck, that tone of sly cruelty made her insides twist.

"Saaaaa-sha," he called out. "Baby doll, don't hide from me."

She sank back farther in the doorway as she waited. She was supposed to be playing the submissive, but she kept snapping back in retaliation, like that night at the cafe when she'd burned him with a cigarette. Once it'd been the heel of her stiletto in his groin, hard enough to send him to the hospital.

But he _liked_ it. Made her skin crawl.

She couldn't seem to help it though. Something fierce in her rebelled whenever Vadim's boot hit the place between her shoulder blades and pushed her to the floor on her hands and knees.

Metaphorically, of course. She hadn't let the fucker get that close to touching her. Not yet anyway. He seemed to grow ever more horny and rutting whenever she denied him though. She was still playing the Moscovite socialite-runaway, so she could preserve some of her integrity.

And her marriage vows. Fuck.

"I'll find you, you little whore. Can't hide from me."

She sucked in a breath and licked her lips, heard him just beginning to approach the long alley.

And then she darted forward, straight into his trap just like dumb, self-destructive Sasha would, and he growled and clamped his arms around her too tightly, laughing in her ear.

"You little fool. I've got you now."

At least she'd gotten him so blind drunk earlier in the night that he wouldn't be able to get it up. At least there was that.

* * *

Damn it. How long could the bastard hold out on her?

She'd reported back to Mitchell that it was still a big fat zero and she knew that time was of the essence. She remembered how Castle had called this organization worse than Foley's because Vadim had access to nuclear materials that he turned around and sold to the black market.

Which was how she found herself in a damn strip club, sitting on his lap with him just a little too happy to see her.

Vadim's hands were at her waist and flirting with the slinky edge of her top, fingers at her belly, trying to get under the waistband of her skirt. She wriggled on his lap to distract him and he surged against her, grunting, that pleased noise that made her heart freeze and shrivel in her chest.

When his fingers snaked to her skirt and skimmed her inside thigh, she twisted rapidly on his lap, a little too fast, probably hurting him, and she reached out and circled her hand at his neck. Squeezed.

"Strip club policy says no touching the merchandise," she said sweetly, but she knew her smile was cold.

He grinned back, flashing her that twisted and cruel smile. "Baby doll, you're not merchandise."

"I can be," she whispered back, rocked her knee too hard into his lap. He yelped and gripped her neck, jerked her back so that her head rattled.

"Go get me a drink, you bitch." He shoved her off his lap and she laughed, heard the tinkling sound of it in her voice like broken glass.

"Vad, I don't wanna stay here all night. I want you alone," she said over her shoulder, swaying her hips as she walked away. She said it because she knew that two more rounds of vodka shots would leave him impotent.

She'd already felt him losing it.

"We'll see," he said noncommitedly. "Drinks, Sasha. Before I grow tired of your smart mouth."

She sauntered to the bar.

Suddenly he bellowed out from the table. "When you get back, Sasha, you're fucking dancing for me. You can't get out of it tonight."

Like hell she was.

* * *

Beckett pressed her head back against the wooden door but she felt far from safe.

Her hands were shaking.

She shut her mouth tighter and sank down to the floor, her heart thudding like a rabbit with a sensation she despised: fear.

Vadim scared the ever-loving shit out of her.

Sasha. Not Beckett. It was Sasha that had just had a near-escape, Sasha whose mouth was bleeding and swollen, Sasha whose tight pants were now ripped at the zipper and ruined.

She made a noise in the back of her throat and shoved herself off the floor, pacing the little room that had been Sasha's home for the last nine days. She ran a hand through her hair, scraped it back and held it on top of her head as she stared unseeingly at the night outside her window.

She still felt his hand at her zipper, felt him pressed too close.

Beckett growled at herself and started stripping out of her clothes, standing in front of the window with the moonlight across her body. She didn't fucking care. Let him see what she damn well wasn't ever going to give him.

Bastard.

She gritted her teeth and ripped the shirt off over her head, fingers catching in the ripped seam at the side. She flung it in the corner of the room and shoved her hands into her panties and yanked them down. The cotton caught at her feet and she shivered, stepped out of them as she moved to the bathroom.

She flipped on the shower but it would never get as hot as she needed it; she'd taken a cold shower every morning so far, giving up on waiting for it to heat.

She stood in the darkness of the bathroom, blinking back a rush of burning need in her eyes, and for the first time, she wished Castle were here.

She had to finish the job. Get inside that factory and get the information.

And then get herself _home._

* * *

It was a different bar this time. Still, she didn't let it throw her; she was single-minded tonight. She wasn't going to take no for an answer.

"Vad-" she started, but he cut her off with a hand tightening at the back of her neck and a jerk of her body into his. She'd been thinking about that damn factory, and he'd caught her unaware - she nearly fell off the chair again.

"I said enough," he growled. "You complain more than you kiss, baby doll."

"Your breath tastes bad," she muttered back, elbowing him away. They were at the cafe again tonight and her skirt was rucked up a little higher than she liked. Vadim kept dipping his eyes down and fingering her knee as she sat beside him.

"You like what my tongue can do, and you know it," he laughed at her. But his eyes were now on the road facing the cafe, and his hand drifted away from her knee even though the fingers tightened at her neck.

"I really want to see where you work, Vad. You know how all that power turns me on, that big wide desk. . .laid out over it-"

Suddenly Vadim turned and backhanded her in the face, reopening the wound at her cheek and making her eyes sting with it. "Hush your pretty face. Or well, not so pretty now. Here comes that guy I was telling you about."

It was full dark now, of course, and the bar's interior lights didn't make it out this far. She licked the blood that was at her lip, touched her cheek gingerly since Vadim wasn't looking at her now. He was studying the man coming down the cobbled street like a jackal scenting roadkill. The man was hunched into the cold air, merely a smudged shadow against the rough outline of warehouses and bars and concrete.

"What man?" she asked. Vadim she could handle. Vadim and a sadistic friend, she was less confident about.

"You said you'd be into it, baby doll."

Be into-

Fuck, no. He'd been fumbling at her breasts and she'd made filthy promises just to get off his fucking lap.

"Oh, yeah?" she murmured, her neck pinched fiercely in his grip. "Who is he?"

"Lev. Been hanging around for a few weeks at the bar. Wants a job - well, I'll give him a job. We'll both of us take you. At the factory, baby doll, I have my very own office, a door and private space - you keep asking for it. Now you'll get it." He laughed at the look on her face and then turned to the man who had just now come into the light of the outdoor cafe. "Isn't that right, Lev?"

Sasha lifted her eyes to the new man and her blood ran cold.

Fuck.

It was Castle.

* * *

He had to hand it to her; she didn't bat an eye.

Maybe that was because of the nasty looking bruise swelling up under her cheek, but either way, it was Castle himself who almost ruined her cover.

But instead he turned the incredulous shock of his gaze into a lecherous rake of his eyes over the scantily clad body, and then he eased back on his heels like he wanted nothing more than to have some of that - as Vadim had promised.

Vadim smacked the outside table and stood up, dragging Beckett up with him, and Castle met her eyes behind Vadim's back, saw the steel flashing at him.

All right. He had no idea why she was here - or when - but evidently they had the same mission. Get inside Vadim's office.

"Come on, Lev. I'll take you both to my kingdom, eh?" Vadim had his hand at Beckett's neck, dragging her after him like an errant farm animal. Castle had to consciously loosen his fists and hurry to catch up, put himself at pace with the man rather than his _wife_ who played the part of chattel entirely too well.

"Your kingdom. Finally. Beginning to think you were all talk. Fancy office, run of the place. Sure, sure." Castle gruffly joked with him and made out like he was eyeballing the woman.

"She's tasty, yes?" Vadim purred like a fucking jungle cat, and the scars along his knuckles proved he was more of a battering ram than a lover. "Sasha. You'll enjoy her. I know this."

"You bring one for yourself?" he asked slyly, elbowing Vadim rather viciously and enjoying it. Vadim better not _know_ anything, if the fucking bastard wanted to live after today. _Sasha_. Hell. And. Fucking. Damnation.

"Haha," Vadim chortled. "I'll let you go first. Here, lover boy. Pant after her."

He flung Beckett at Castle by the neck and while he wanted to cradle his wife and put her on his other side, away from Vadim, the Lev in him merely tangled his fist in her hair and scraped his teeth at her neck.

Despite that, he felt Kate's fingers at the waistband of his pants, a caress that made his breath catch and his eyes closed for just a bare, life-altering moment.

And then he opened his eyes as Lev.

Get in, get the information, get out. Let no one know. Those were the parameters; Beckett being in place with him, cozied up to Vadim, meant only that the CIA weren't sure who'd have a better chance and the information was valuable enough to need them both.

He knew it was - he'd helped design the mission. So had she, in fact, back in New York. But when had the Director sent her here instead of sticking with the original plan? and _fuck_ this couldn't end well.

"You like?" Vadim said smugly. "I even let you go first. Have what you want, leave some skin unmarked for me. We're almost there."

Sasha curled at his side and began playing with the button of his pants, fingers tripping up and down his belly, sly and clever. "Hey, baby, you get to go first."

Fuck, he could _not_ let her get to him.

She hummed and rose to kiss his jaw, teeth flashing.

Vadim was eyeing them narrowly as they walked the dark streets up towards the factory nestled at the top of the town. "Ah, look at that. She likes you. Be careful, Lev; she bites. Hard."

"Love that mouth," he growled back, eyes darting from her to Vadim, trying to walk the line. "You plan on watching us?"

"You'll see." But Vadim wasn't the type to sit back and enjoy the show, not with his own goods, and this whole time Castle had been the subservient one in this forced friendship. He couldn't imagine Vadim actually being hospitable.

Something else going on here.

"Baby," he gasped, stumbling as her hand found him, rough and hard. "Fuck, Sasha. Give me a chance to get you alone."

She tittered, evidently Sasha was pleased with herself, and Castle tightened his grip on her hair and brought her mouth to his. She blocked Vadim from sight and he gentled his kiss until he was barely tracing her lips with his tongue, breathing love into the gesture. She was smiling at him with Kate in her eyes when he pulled her back, but he gripped her chin and pushed her face away.

"Fucking bitch. She bit me." He pushed his tongue around his bottom lip and Sasha cackled.

"I warned you," Vadim boomed out. The darkness was broken into pieces by his pleased laughter - evidently he was looking to 'sic' Sasha on Lev, repay him with a brutal beast of a whore.

Oh yeah.

Castle was looking forward to this.

* * *

Beckett had to play the part equally, even though she'd much rather put on a show with her own damn husband rather than with Vadim's clawing, harsh, onion-scented hands on her. But if she didn't, if she looked more interested in Castle than Vadim, he'd try to beat her again and Castle would absolutely lose it.

Or he wouldn't. Hard to say with Castle; he was a professional, and he knew she could handle herself, but-

Well. Vadim would be dead, most likely. And they needed in that office, needed that information gotten out without anyone noticing.

So she sucked on Vadim's tongue and growled as his hands traveled, and then they were at the factory's employee entrance and Castle was grunting something about, _let's get on with it._

She lifted her eyes to him and he narrowed his, reached out and grabbed her even as Vadim pulled keys out of his pocket and moved to unlock the door. Kate hummed and pressed her mouth to his neck, licked his adam's apple as he reclaimed all the skin that Vadim had bruised and pinched.

"You'll have to let him - some," he murmured at her ear. "Give me five minutes in that office, and then we're done."

"I can handle him," she reassured Castle, curling her fingers in his hair and nudging his nose with her lips. "We do what we gotta do."

"You got this, love," he sighed. His fingers cupped her cheek, his thumb light across the swelling. She closed her eyes.

She gasped when Vadim yanked her away, but she gave Castle a look, quelling him, and let Vadim tuck her in close.

"Come on, baby doll. You're not supposed to be getting sweet on the little fucker." He snarled and pressed a bruising kiss to her mouth, more teeth than anything. "This way."

When she pulled back, narrowing her eyes at him - Vadim liked her rebellious streak, liked for her to stand up for herself only so he could bash her back down - he had that cruel smile on his face, the one that made her think he saw too much, knew and understood more than she gave him credit for.

His hand gripped her by the neck, dragging her after him. She let him, of course; she could've broken his elbow and flipped him to the ground, but they had to get in that office and get out without Vadim knowing what this whole thing was about. His suppliers, his dealers, his contacts - the CIA needed something to go on, some actionable information, and they couldn't let on that they were wise to it.

But whatever game Vadim thought he was playing with her tonight, she saw that it was really about fucking over Castle.

And that had her worried.

Vadim led them through a twisting maze of factory machinery, their bulking shadows like monsters in the darkness. Vadim's voice boomed as he boasted to Castle that his factory was the most strict, the tightest run, and had the best time for product turnout. _A few fingers shaved here and there, what is that to me?_

Because they were supposed to, they laughed with him, but she pulled away from Vadim and edged closer to Castle, brushing her fingers in his. She wished they had a second to talk about this, work it out a little more than _give me five minutes_.

Vadim grabbed her by the neck again and shook her a little. "Aren't you cozy with him? I think, instead, mine first, baby doll."

She gave him a slick smile and a snarl, then she stepped in close and brought her knee up for his groin. He deflected - he knew that move and was on guard against it after last time - but he laughed heartily and seemed to enjoy her defiance.

Castle pushed ahead of them and gave Vadim a wicked twist of his lips, raised his hands for the keys. "Toss 'em here. She's ready for it. So am I."

His Russian was good - better than Kate remembered - and Vadim was chuckling something about the Russian dogs in heat (she wanted to break his balls; she wanted to make him a fucking eunuch), and then Vadim chucked the keys to Castle with a snarl.

She had the feeling that Vadim _hated_ Castle, and she couldn't figure out what the hell they were doing here tonight. It had to be something.

All those machines. The fingers shaved off here and there. . .and Beckett - Sasha - to keep him distracted?

"Around the corner. Second door on the left." Vadim gripped her by the arm and darted in to bite her neck, his breath foul and his tongue sloppy. "Come on, you bitch."

She fucking hated him.

She hoped she was up close and personal when the CIA raided his fucking warehouse; she wanted him to know it was her.

But that probably wouldn't happen. It never happened like that.

Castle opened the door and Vadim's fingers were around her neck, choking, driving her back against the metal file cabinets in a heartbeat.

Shit. Castle had to get _in_ those cabinets.

Beckett arched and reached for Vadim's privates, dragged him to the desk and slammed him on top. He let out a grunt and groaned, flipped her on her back, a stapler, a phone, hard points of contact at her spine. She writhed under him to get a leg up, saw Castle over Vadim's shoulder.

At the file cabinets. With the keys still in his hand. Doing his job.

Good. Because, fuck, Vadim was a mean bastard and she wasn't looking forward to what came next.


	2. Chapter 2

**Close Encounters 8**

* * *

The cold fury burning in Castle's belly made everything clear.

Easy.

He picked the lock on the file cabinet in seconds, his ears open to the grunts behind him, the brutal Russian and his every movement, but Castle's focus remained on the information. He flipped through the hard edges of hanging file folders, eyes scanning for anything related to their mission. There was nuclear material being-

_Bingo_.

He slid his phone from the hidden pocket inside his pants, gave Beckett and Vadim a quick look just to check-

Shit. No. Bad idea.

He whipped back around and turned on the night vision lens on his phone, began taking pictures with steady hands. The information meant shutting down an arms dealer funneling plutonium to anti-American governments, and he knew it was important. Vital even. But.

He heard Beckett's growl - a noise he knew, but thank goodness, not from being in bed with her - and at least she could breathe, shit, at least she could breathe because for a second there, he hadn't been sure. Still, Beckett knew how to take care of herself, knew how to dangle the goods but not give out samples.

Castlee knew what he had to do. He also knew what happened once he had what he wanted.

He put the file back and dug through the next drawer, closing his ears to the sounds Vadim made, ignoring the whispers of his _wife_, damn it, and doing his job. The third drawer held more of what he needed, and he found bank account numbers for what could be Vadim's suppliers, felt the triumph flare hotly in his guts.

Done.

Castle finished the job and sent the photos on to the CIA server before slipping the phone back into his pocket.

And then he turned around to deal with Vadim.

He saw the brute working at his zipper, his forearm pressed deep into Beckett's stomach to hold her down. Beckett wasn't passive by any means, but the moment Castle's eyes met hers, she attacked.

Kate scissored her legs and twisted Vadim's out from under him, bringing him down with the suddenness of her assault. The Russian's pants tangled at his ankles and he bellowed, a hand wrapping around Kate's knee as he tried to haul himself up.

Castle stepped in, delivered a brutal blow to the man's kidney, wrapped his arm around Vadim's neck, bringing him up to his knees. Kate hopped off the desk and adjusted her skirt, her eyes dark and more dangerous than he'd ever seen.

He didn't know how far the bastard had gotten, but he'd do something about it.

"You little bastard," Vadim yelled. "I'll cut you _and_ the damn whore."

"You said she was mine first," he said coldly, tightening his hold on Vadim's neck. The man choked and sputtered through it, flailing an arm back to try and get at Castle.

He kneed the man in the back and heard the satisfying crack as his spine twisted.

"Mine first," he repeated. "And what makes you think I want your damaged goods?"

"She's a fucking-"

He twisted harder and Vadim's words were choked off.

Castle lifted his head to Kate, his eyes catching the bruises mottling her neck, the places at her knees that looked like fingers, and finally her bleeding, swollen cheek.

"Which was it?" he said harshly, nodding his head to her. "Which did it? He's right-handed. So a right hook?"

Her eyes finally lifted from Vadim and seemed to clear. "He is right-handed," she said quietly, her voice like steel. "But it was with his left."

"Both then, I think," Castle confirmed. He reached down and wrapped his hand around Vadim's left wrist, felt the man, despite his being strangled, begin to fight as he realized. "Love? - get the desk drawer."

Kate moved then and opened the bottom drawer of the desk, the heavy, ornate wood sliding smoothly, soundlessly. Castle shoved the man's left arm towards the gaping, open mouth and had to wrench Vadim's neck as he began to fight in earnest.

Hunched over Vadim, he held the man's hand steady, Vadim's arm pressed against the face of the drawer above. Vadim began to struggle in earnest, but Castle had him. He lined it up carefully and then he stomped his foot against the bottom drawer.

It smashed his fingers. Vadim let out a scream, his body slumping in true agony, but Castle hadn't heard the telltale snap, so he did it again.

This time he felt the man's fingers break as the reverberations when through his whole body. Vadim began to babble incoherently, but Castle only yanked him around, positioned his right hand for the same treatment.

Vadim lost it, gagging on snot as he sobbed and begged for mercy, but Castle had him in a unbroken chokehold and he opened the drawer wider to get it perfectly centered.

And then he felt Kate's fingers on his shoulder, brushing to his neck, and he looked up.

* * *

Castle's face was like a stone.

She glanced back to Vadim, her heart crowing at his sorry, wretched state despite herself, and then she shook her head at Castle. "He's making a fist now. It won't work that way."

"I can do it one by one," he answered, already pulling Vadim up on his knees. His voice was so calm, so certain.

"No, baby," she whispered. Because she wanted him to, she did. She wanted it like nothing else.

But she couldn't do it herself, and she'd promised him when she took this job that she'd show him a new way. A better way. A way they could live with.

And breaking a man's fingers just because she'd gotten injured on the job wasn't something she could live with. This had no place in their life together.

Vadim seemed to have rallied, wailing at them. "Fucking bitch. I'll ruin you both. I'll-"

Castle turned those cold eyes back to Vadim and strangled him into silence.

"In case you didn't understand me before, Vadim, she's mine first."

"Fuck that," he garbled out, spitting at Castle through his snot. "Fuck you."

Castle brought his face in closer, reached down and closed his hand around Vadim's mangled one, making the Russian scream.

When the agony tapered off, Castle patted his cheek. "She's mine. And I don't share."

And then he punched Vadim in the face, bloodied the man's cheek and nose with a left that made Vadim's head snap back and his body collapse to the floor. Castle extricated himself from the wreck of the man, and he stood, not a hair out of place, not even winded.

"Shall we?" he said quietly, and he offered her his hand.

No trace of what he'd just done, no hint of what it might mean.

So she followed his lead and left it all in that dark office, her hand in Castle's and warm, and they took the long route back through the dark and silent machinery.

Together.

* * *

They couldn't stay in Mayak after that. Of course not. She knew he wanted to hole up and regroup, but they had to get on the road and find a safe house.

"Want to try Samara?" he asked.

"What was all that?" she said instead.

He glanced down at his fist as he started the car, but she cleared her throat and tried again.

"No, not that." She knew why he'd done that. "I'm talking about Mayak. I know - I've seen the restricted signs around the town, the warnings about radiation contamination. That factory. . .nuclear."

He sighed at her and scrubbed his bruising hand through his hair. "Reprocessing plant. You were housed in Ozyorsk?"

She nodded, had to clear her throat again. "Yeah. Everyone is. I - what was he talking about - fingers shaved off?"

"I think, this is speculation here, but I think he was talking about a worker in 2008. His hand was injured and probably contaminated and so his finger was amputated to prevent further. . .damage."

"Shit," she breathed out. "Is it even. . .safe?"

"Reports vary," he said, grimacing at her. She scraped a hand through her hair and felt the force of their speed throw her back against the door.

"Slow down," she murmured. "Vadim's out for a good stretch."

"Yeah," he scraped out. His voice sounded rough; she bet it was in proportion to how rough she _looked_.

"Samara," she repeated. "We'll get a motel - best if you check us in. Clean ourselves up."

He nodded and said nothing more, so she eased back against the seat and tried to not feel Vadim's fingers at her thighs or smell his breath as he ground against her.

It was a job, and she'd done what she had to do. She'd had her eyes on Castle the whole time, knew just how far to let it get, and he'd finished before anything could really happen - one way or another. She'd planned on taking Vadim out herself, getting a little rougher than the brute was used to from her, playing it up like she wanted Lev first.

Lev.

She hummed and opened her eyes to find Castle gripping the steering wheel too hard as he drove. "Lev?"

He huffed a breath, gave her a sidelong look.

"Means lion," she murmured. "Lev. You certainly. . .lived up to it."

He grunted. "Lions usually let their mates do all the hunting."

She sighed back at him, reached across the console to wrap her fingers at his elbow, the thick wool of his coat catching her skin. "Not what I meant. But. It got the job done."

"And you're fine."

"I'm fine," she repeated. She was. Would be.

"I'll stop for some ice for you at the first gas station we hit."

She pressed her lips together against the sudden urge to cry and clutched his coat tighter.

* * *

"Real life takes a back seat to this," she said suddenly in the darkness.

He had just gotten back to the car with a couple of chemical ice packs, was already breaking them out of the box and snapping them in half to get the solution to mix. She watched him steadily as she said it and he wondered what she saw in his face.

"I know that better than most," he answered finally.

Was she talking about not letting him break Vadim's other hand? Because he regretted that, he definitely did, and maybe she was trying to insinuate that he put his morality on hold when he worked a job.

That had always been their sticking point.

"But Castle - nothing happened."

He lifted his eyes to hers in the dark interior of the car, sitting outside a Russian convenience store, and he realized with horror that she meant - she was talking about - she hadn't-

"Shit," he breathed out.

His hands were shaking suddenly on the damn cold pack so that she had to take it and do it herself. He watched her crush the pack with her fingers to create the cold reaction, and then she spread it out and covered his knuckles with it.

He grunted and flipped over to take it from her, lifted it instead to her face, to the swelling at her cheekbone, but that rage, the cold knot of fury, had at least dissipated. He'd gotten what was required, and Vadim was nothing. Less than nothing.

"Hurt?" he said quietly.

Her first instinct must have been to shake her head because she made a motion and winced, opened one eye to him as he cradled the side of her face.

"Didn't until right this second," she sighed.

He brought her other hand to her face to cover the ice pack and then he turned back to the car, started the engine once more. "Samara's about an hour. We'll have to cross the bridge once we get close to the city - we'll find a motel as soon as we can."

Her fingers were cold on his forearm. "Castle."

"I know," he said, nodding. He did her the courtesy of looking at her to affirm that he did, honestly, know and he saw she'd tilted her head against the seat, the ice pack trapped against her cheek. "I know, Kate. It never - it actually hadn't entered my mind that he might have. I've trained with you; I know what you can do. You were in control."

"I watched you search the file cabinets. So I knew how much time I had, when to - I had it under control."

He nodded, but she'd been right when she said real life took a back seat. Real life was kicking and screaming back there but neither of them had the luxury to let it out. Not yet.

Her fingers flexed over his forearm. "Drive, Castle."

So he did.

* * *

She laid the seat back a little so that it was easier to prop up the ice, sandwiching the pack between her cheek and the seat, her shoulder tucked in and aching. From what, she couldn't remember, but there were plenty of moments over the last week, plenty of hits she took for the team.

For the good of the country?

For - at least - the good of the world. She'd had an idea, going in, that the Mayak 'factory' was a high value target, and then the signs everywhere warning about radioactive fallout and contaminated groundwater and. . .she'd figured it out quickly.

Anyone that Vadim was in league with wasn't going to be responsible with nuclear materials. It wasn't like plutonium was something to mess around with.

But she was tired. And she'd get the details from Castle later, if he even knew. He'd been just as surprised to see her there as she'd been to see him.

She was tired and the car was quiet and Castle's hand was heavy over her knee. Like an anchor, keeping her with him, grounded, and she let her eyes close and drifted along the current of her own mind, knowing he wouldn't let her get too far.

* * *

She woke in the car to his fingers stroking her hair from her face, the warm weight of his hand and his thumb just under her eye. He smiled at her, and that he could - that the smile was there at all - pulled an answering one from her that stretched her whole face.

"Hey," she rasped, voice dark with sleep.

"Hey, beautiful," he murmured. Patently untrue, with her face swollen and her eye nearly shut with it and the prostitute's outfit. Jeez, it was terrible. But he looked like he was in love with her, adored her, and she smiled wider even though it hurt.

"You get us a room?" she asked, casting her eyes over the dark parking lot. A standard motel, Soviet-era, doors leading to the crumbling stairs and the hulking shape of an ice machine in the breezeway. She could see the outdoor pool from here, lit up so that the blue bobbed on the water, mesmerizing.

"I got us a room. Ground floor. You good?" He took the ice pack from her cheek and inspected it.

"I'm good," she affirmed and shifted in the seat to click open her seat belt. He got out of the car and they closed their doors at the same time, the slam reverberating in the empty parking lot. She came to his side and took his hand, cradling his swollen knuckles. He had the ice pack in his other hand, the room key, and she let him lead the way across the cracked pavement.

He opened the room, 109, and the closed-up smell hit them like a wave. "Sorry," he muttered.

She laughed and shook her head - carefully, slowly - and pushed past him to go inside. Flipping the comforter back, feeling through the sheets, she turned to him.

"It's fine," she said. "Little musty, but clean."

He nodded and shut the door after them, locked it, dropped keys and a gun to the formica top of the dresser. His back was to her and she saw the lines of tension begin to drain, wondered just how worked up he'd gotten himself while she'd slept during the car ride here.

Here. The middle of Russia, on a mission that had gone - not exactly wrong, but not right either.

She wanted to do something about it, for both of them, but she needed a shower first. A long, hot shower.

With him, preferrably. If he could even look at her like that - maybe she should wait, get clean, and then-?

She glanced over at him and he was standing motionless in the middle of the room, inert, blank. She suddenly had a powerful sense that this was what it had always been like for him, the letdown after a mission that had gone like theirs just had, the nothing that was creeping into his eyes and pushing out his soul.

"Castle," she murmured, reaching for him. He swayed at her touch but it took his eyes a long time to come back to her. She put her hands carefully at his waist, waited to see what his reaction would be before slowly inching his shirt out of his pants.

He stared down at her for half a beat more and then he seemed to come back to himself and his eyes shifted to silver in the darkness, that mercurial blue that spilled heat down her spine and curled her hips towards his.

He skimmed his hands at her back and came in to brush his mouth across her cheek, slowly, softly, barely there.

"I need a shower," she breathed at his ear. "And you do too."

His laughter was strained but it came, a rush of air across her temple. "Is that an invitation?"

"No. It's a demand." She pushed her fingers up under his shirt and splayed them over his abs, his ribs, felt the hitch of his breath as she touched him. "Got a problem with that?"

"No, ma'am. Lead the way."

* * *

It was like they were in an epic game of chicken. Or a staring contest and neither would blink first.

Castle looked at her and she watched him looking, and neither of them looked away.

She undressed quickly, stepping out of the miniskirt and underwear, a tug of the slinky top over her head, her breasts swinging free. Unmarred, he noted, hated that he was noting it at all. She took his hands and kissed his palms, pressed them against her chest over her heart. He took his cue from her, let his fingers spread out until he could touch everything, until he encompassed her completely and she hummed and came closer, reaching for his pants.

She worked fast, and he was helping her get rid of the last of it even as she turned from him and flipped the shower on. He leaned past her and adjusted the temperature, felt her fingertips at his spine and skimming low. Castle shot her a look over his shoulder and she quirked an eyebrow, the broken skin at her cheek splitting open again.

He turned and cupped her jaw, something torquing in his chest and ever-tightening, but she pressed closer, her arms around his neck and her body stretched out against his and it felt too good, his traitorous arousal burning the anxiety clear.

She seemd to like that though. She was caressing his back with her hands, her mouth open at his neck, that hum of appreciation low in her throat. He wrapped his arms around her and kept her close, shutting his eyes to the rest of it, letting the feel of her drown everything else.

"Get in, love," she murmured then. "Shower first."

Of course, of course. Anything.

* * *

She was shaking.

He didn't seem to notice, but how could he not? Maybe he was just not saying anything, letting her have her dignity. What remained of it.

But her hands shook and the muscles in her thighs quivered, and the water sluiced over her and burned it was so hot. He'd washed his hair methodically, by rote it seemed, and she'd taken the motel shampoo and tried, but-

Her brain kept skipping around, one thing to another, so that she couldn't concentrate long enough to finish anything. She raised her hands to her hair once more and turned to put her back to the water, let it rinse her clean, but her arms up and her breasts exposed made her tremble.

"Kate," he said, and his hand cupped the back of her head, holding her steady, his other arm wrapping around her waist. Their bodies were wet, slick as they touched, and she closed her eyes and let him angle her hair under the spray, do the rest of it for her.

"I'm okay," she said hollowly.

But she wasn't quite. Close but-

His fingers combed through her hair, and she swayed on her feet with it, following his hand. Castle cradled the back of her neck and she tensed.

"Bruised?"

She nodded and worked her throat to speak but nothing came.

"I'm sorry," he breathed out and his lips followed his fingers at the side of her neck, touching softly, everything about him light and gentle.

"Not going to break," she rasped.

He chuckled at her skin and her hands clutched his sides, her body canting towards his so suddenly that she was surprised. Floored by how much - how intently she needed him.

"Castle," she groaned.

"Love you, sweetheart. Love you."

"Please," she breathed against him, clutching harder, needing more than just the light touch of his fingers or the reverent ghost of his kiss. That he loved her, that sweetheart came out of his mouth at all after tonight - her heart was caving in her chest and she needed him to fill her up.

"Kate, love-"

"Slowly," she demanded, swallowing hard as it tumbled out. She stared up at him through the water misting between them and she realized he hadn't kissed her mouth. Not once so far.

And then he did.

* * *

She tasted clear and refreshing, like water, like sunlight through the trees. She tasted like Kate, his wife, and he didn't know how that was possible, but he was so damn grateful.

He realized now that he'd been afraid.

But she hadn't changed; she was still here. He could touch her and she seemed stronger for it; he could hold her up and she wouldn't collapse.

She wasn't okay, but he could help.

He kissed her slowly, like she'd asked, and he trimmed her lips with his even as she sighed against him and pulled him closer. He pressed his tongue to her mouth until she opened for him and came out to play, eagerness in the lines of her body. Too eager. Too needy.

She needed him to want her, didn't she?

It jerked through him like lightning, searing everything else to ash, and he wrapped his arms around her and lifted, aligning their bodies, her legs coming around his hips and her moan caught in his mouth, and the friction and slide of them made his heart pound.

She needed him to want her.

And he did, he did, he could do that for her.

"Now, Castle," she panted, and then arched her body into his.

He could do this all night.

* * *

Even though the steam fogged the air between them, she opened her eyes and watched his face as he fell apart after her, the need and the love and the joy that shined like a lighthouse from his whole being, guiding her home.

He sank down to the edge of the bathtub, cradling her close, and laughed into her neck, a groan coming at the end of it.

She felt stronger in him than apart.

But so tired.

Her head dropped to his shoulder and her legs hung awkwardly over the side of the tub, and his arms were shaking as he held her but he didn't let go. The water beat down and the humid kiss of the shower made it hard to breathe, but his palms stroked up and down her back and eased everything else.

After a long moment, he reached over and turned the water off. She had her eyes closed but she kissed the wet skin of his neck, licked the drops that collected in his collarbone. He shivered at her touch and moved to wrap a towel around her body, tucking it in. She gathered it gratefully, let him pick her up and place her on the lid of the toilet.

He got out himself, grabbed another towel to dry off, dropped it on the floor. She watched him, her knees pulled up to her chest, boneless and sleepy and loose, and then he came in close and scooped her up.

She grinned against his neck as he tried to get out of the bathroom, angling them, and then he was carrying her to the bed and dropping her down, not gently at all, but with that bounce that made her laugh, popped it right out of her mouth and dispelled the seriousness on his face.

He smiled back, looking pleased with himself, and she wriggled out of the damp towel and pushed it off the bed.

"Crawl in, Castle."

She didn't even need to ask; he was already there.


	3. Chapter 3

**Close Encounters 8**

* * *

He had thought she was asleep, but her voice came out of the darkness. Strong, quiet, serious.

"He didn't get very far," she was saying.

He kept still, tried not to breathe, to break the spell of the night and their love that seemed to release her words like a bird from a cage. Tentative, distrusting the wide world beyond, but ready to go.

"He liked torturing more than touching," she said then, wryness in her tone to mask whatever else was under it.

Castle spread his fingers out over her shoulder, pushed a kiss to her temple. She was his; she was going to be fine. She had to tell the story.

"I'm bruised but I could've broken his fingers myself. If it had helped."

"You were pretty feisty," he gave.

"He liked that too." She snorted at his neck like it was amusing, but it wasn't. "Every shot I got in, every smack he took, every time I had to knee him in the groin - he _liked_ it. And that - seemed worse."

So she let him. . .?

So she let him.

He skimmed his palm down her back and she snuggled closer, strong and yet so delicate at the same time. Her scent in his every breath, every inhale belonging to her.

"Torturing him back was easy," she said then. "I just didn't - I wouldn't let him touch anything _fun_, he said. It made him crazy, he wanted me all the more, and so-"

He waited but she didn't fill that in.

"And so the factory," he finished.

"Yes. That."

Her body was still warm and fluid against his. He'd made love to her in this bed with the intent on worship, to bare every secret thing, and she'd made him a believer in the power their connection held to heal, to cleanse, to make everything right.

"And tonight?" he asked, because she still needed to say the words.

"Tonight sucked."

He let out a startled laugh, his arms tightening around her, and she smiled against his neck. Her felt her fingers at his waist, coasting up and down, a little artless. She was tired.

"Tonight sucked until you," she murmured then. "When you showed up, everything was fine."

"Yeah?" He skated his hand up to tangle in her still wet hair, kissing the side of her uninjured face. "Just showing up?"

"I knew it would be fine."

"Is it?"

"It is," she breathed out. "It's fine now."

"Then sleep, Kate, sweetheart. Sleep."

* * *

She woke to his grunt of surprise and the screech of car tires, doors being slammed.

"Castle?"

"Get down," he rasped.

She scissored her legs and rolled out of bed, following him over the side and naked, reached back into the sheets for a tshirt, something, but there was nothing. Just the clothes she'd worn in Mayak, skimpy and torn stripper clothes.

Fuck.

He was naked as he crawled across the room, snagged his weapon from the dresser top, the keys. She could hear the sound of voices, the pissed off language and the roar of quarry hounded to its hole and she knew the voice. She knew the voice.

Vadim.

Castle threw his tshirt at her; it hit her shoulder and she grabbed for it, her heart pounding. She crouched and put it on even as he scuttled to the window, barely moved the curtain aside to look out.

"Fuck." His shoulders hunched. "Vadim doesn't even care about the element of surprise, does he?" He said this as the trucks revved their engines and shined their headlights into the motel's windows, clearly illuminating the room, the huddled furniture.

"I should've let you smash the other hand," she muttered, shivering in the tshirt. At least with the curtains drawn, Vadim couldn't see inside. For now.

"Get in the bathroom," Castle said over his shoulder.

"No."

"Yes. You don't have a gun and-"

"They have fucking automatics and they will shoot this place apart before they even try the door. You said it - they didn't care about the element of surprise. If I'm going, you are too."

He narrowed his eyes at her but when he turned back to the window, he must have seen something, because he dived back for the other side of the bed and crashed on top of her. The place erupted, gunfire so loud it sounded like it was right at her ear, and Castle flinched and pushed off the floor.

She snagged him back down, tugging on his arm even as she crouched there, and she was hauling him towards the bathroom in the next instant. Thank God he wasn't acting the macho idiot and firing back with his meager Sig; save the bullets for when it mattered.

They fell into the bathroom together, plaster exploding around them as she jerked her foot inside, scrambling over broken tile, pieces of ceiling, the wall. Heat seared her hip and she grunted, but Castle was scooping her up and dumping them both into the bathtub.

They hunkered down as the place exploded around them, automatic fire tearing through the paper thin walls, the cheap plasterboard, chipping the porcelain. Castle had his back against the side of the tub, but it meant he also had his back to the room, shielding her. She could kill him for it, but she was afraid to move him, afraid that if they didn't lie side by side, they wouldn't see Vadim coming.

"When it stops," he yelled in her ear. "When they stop to look-"

"We fucking kill them," she growled back.

"Yes, ma'am."

* * *

He felt the grim determination rise up in him so hard and so tight it nearly choked him. Her body was tense against his, one of her hands had closed around his bicep like a lifeline.

Vadim.

He was going to dismember him. Piece by piece. Or let Beckett do it.

The flash of gunfire halted, but he stayed where he was, kept Beckett at his side. Sure enough, after a moment's sweet but too-short silence, the automatics rattled again, spraying the place anew.

No one in this godforsaken place was going to lift a finger to help, to intervene, not against Vadim. The nuclear industrial complex at Mayak had its clutch on this river basin; no one would be calling the police.

And then it went deadly silent.

She was breathing hard at his neck and he was still naked, his flesh scored with a hundred small cuts, the bathtub gritty with blood and water and debris, and he curled his arm at her neck and lifted his head slightly.

She was bleeding.

"Kate," he hissed, his hand going to her hip.

She flinched and arched away from him. "No, no. I'm okay. Just - grazed me. I'm okay."

"Fuck," he growled and propped himself up on his elbow to lift the tshirt and look. His shirt was ragged, black with blood in the near-darkness, the headlights from the cars shining through holes in the plaster and highlighting her pale face.

"I'm okay; I'm okay," she said, pushing him back down. "Where's your weapon?"

He showed her the gun, and at that moment, the door to the motel room shook violently under a brutal force.

"They're trying to get in," he muttered.

She lifted up on her elbows and looked at him. "Didn't think the door could withstand that."

"I flipped the privacy bar," he grinned.

She laughed, a sound so alien and and yet so beautiful in the strobing darkness, her face made blue by the car headlights and her body shrouded in shadows.

"Let's get ready," she said then, shoving on him. He crawled out of the bathtub silently, found the tattered remnants of her miniskirt at his feet and handed it over to her. She grimaced, but it was better than his current nothing - although the nudity didn't bother him. Her nudity? With Vadim out there, yes, he wanted her covered up.

He eased open the bathroom door and put his bare shoulder to the frame, watching the progress at the door. He felt Beckett at his side and then saw her creep forward to one of the gaping holes in the plaster by the toilet. He didn't like her exposed like that, but at least they weren't shooting.

How many had Vadim brought with him? His hand broken, probably in a great deal of pain, roaring drunk it sounded like too, and he'd come after them with friends. A posse. Castle had counted two other cars beside Vadim's, but he couldn't know how many bodies were inside.

"I can see outside," she breathed.

He jerked his head towards her, saw her perched on the lid of the intact toilet, straining to see out a hole high up.

"What do you see?"

"Four guys total. That's it. Can he be so fucking stupid?"

Castle grunted. "From what I've seen-"

She gave a little laugh and climbed back down. "Good point. Fucking stupid is right."

"I'll shoot them as they come in, but I'll probably only get two before they realize and come up with a better plan."

"Let the first one come in a little ways so I can take his gun when he falls," Beckett said, breathing right at his shoulder. "Okay?"

She was amazing. He was in love. If he hadn't been before-

"Got it," he murmured and then he cupped her face and kissed her hard.

* * *

Beckett tugged the shirt back up her shoulder and poised on the balls of her feet, ignoring the crunch of plaster and the chips of porcelain that seemed to dig deeper the longer they waited. Castle, squatting naked at the door, must be sliced to ribbons, and she saw a thin line of blood tracking down his tricep.

And then it was on.

The door snapped open and bounced back, smacking the lead guy in the forearm as he came through. He had an automatic rifle slung over one shoulder, finger on the trigger guard, and Castle shot him in the head before he had a chance.

The man fell at the foot of the bed, a bloom of gray matter spattering the bullet-ridden television, and then his body was right there, crumpled on the floor. Beckett waited but the second guy came on in as well, morons all of them, and Castle took him out before he even passed the threshold.

The bodies made an effective barrier.

"Good shot," she murmured to Castle and then nodded towards the man nearest their position. He nodded back and duck-walked forward, and despite herself, Kate felt the giggle bursting out of her lips - somewhat hysterical, mostly surreal - but she bit it down and followed him out of the protection of the bathroom.

Castle fired a burst towards the door as another guy advanced; Vadim's men fell back when the bullets flied and Kate lunged for the fallen comrade on the floor. She untangled his fingers from the grip and unsnapped the strap, fit the stock to her shoulder as she scurried back to their position at the bathroom.

Castle's hand was at her spine and pushing her inside before she realized what was happening and then the motel room was exploding around them, another frenetic volley of automatic weapons fire as they dived into the bathtub once more. Castle grabbed the barrel of the rifle and she gave it over, switched weapons with him.

"Fucking moron," he growled. "I'm going to enjoy this."

He lifted up only enough to sight the gun and then fired back.

From outside, she heard the clatter of their automatic weapons, the rev of engines, and then silence. A piece of the inside wall fell in a chunk, causing one of their guys to fire indiscriminately, and then glass was breaking.

"Coming in the window?" she murmured.

"I can't see. Hold on," Castle replied softly and then leaped like a cat out of the bathtub towards the hole in the bathroom wall.

"Shit," she hissed. "Castle. You're naked. Get back here."

"So?" he said, rather cavalier and careless, and she crawled out of the tub herself to perch on the toilet seat. Vadim's men had breached the front picture window and were smashing out glass in hurried chops of the butt of their weapons, ducking back to avoid whatever crossfire might come from inside.

She watched, counting distinctive hands, and then turned to Castle. "I think five more. Must've been in the car."

"My count too," he agreed. "Well. Let's get on with it. I want to take out this lot before someone calls in the military."

Oh, good point. With the nuclear plant so close, even if the local police couldn't be counted on for rescue, the military might send people in.

Castle checked the weapon once more. "Whoever Vadim belongs to - and you know he's someone's pet - they might come looking to clean up his mess."

"Shit," she breathed out.

"No, this is good," he said, something like relish in his voice. He was _looking forward_ to this. "Now everyone will know it was a fight over a woman. There'll be nothing tying it back to that processing plant. Just Vadim being his usual stupid self."

She breathed out in relief and nodded. "All right. So what's the plan now, super spy?"

* * *

When the first man came in the window, he was already in position below it. Castle reached up and twisted the man's neck, breaking it cleanly as the body fell over him. The man coming in behind him didn't have the chance to stop, and Castle drew the knife from the dead man's sheath and plunged it into the exposed jugular of the second henchman, spraying blood as he twisted the blade.

The man didn't even scream.

He glanced to Beckett - acting lookout from behind the bed - and she held up two fingers. He stayed poised beneath the window, shattered glass under his feet, blood slicking his hands, and he waited half a beat before the third man came in as well.

Fucking idiots, every last one.

Castle stabbed the knife upwards into the vulnerable part of the man's inside arm, jerked the blade downward into the chest cavity. The guy screamed, a violent and gurgling thing as his lung was punctured, and Castle used the handle of the knife to bodily throw the man over into the room.

He looked to Beckett. She shook her head and flicked a finger back; the last man had retreated. He scrambled to one side, over a groaning body, and she tossed him the Sig once more. He caught it easily, his hand gritty with blood and debris, and then he cleared the doorway in a crouch and went on the offensive.

Finally.

Two men, clean shot for the first, the second required some treachery. The idiot was ducked behind the car door of his SUV, so Castle blew out his kneecap and the man fell with a scream, allowing Castle the headshot.

And then there was only Vadim, drunk and raging from the front seat where his last man had died.

Castle stood from his crouch, felt the thick paste of blood and dirt and plaster over his body, every cut and scrape that stung as his muscles rippled in movement and behind him - behind him - Kate.

Vadim had come for Kate. Even now, even now, Vadim was wrenching open the door and shouldering a weapon, some bulky automatic rifle with modifications that looked ridiculous and too heavy for him, one-handed and rageful and drunk.

Vadim squinted one eye and tried to aim.

Castle was going to savor every moment of this.

* * *

Beckett stood in the doorway of their destroyed motel room and watched Castle advance. She had the automatic in her hand, but she didn't expect to need it.

Only she didn't know what to do. Couldn't stop Castle now. Not after all this. Not when Vadim had shown he wouldn't stop either - his pride too damaged, his stupidity too massive - and even though this was the very thing Kate had joined the CIA to stop, she could do nothing.

Nothing.

Castle, naked and sheened with sweat and blood, strode out into the parking lot like he was a Titan. The gun was at his thigh, not even aimed at Vadim, and his sheer, relentless march forward seemed to be scaring the shit out of Vadim.

Beckett shivered in the whip of cold Russian wind but Castle reached the SUV and yanked the weapon out of Vadim's hands.

"You and that bitch-" Vadim started, but Castle backhanded him across the mouth in a blow both vicious and completely, frighteningly sterile.

No malice was in Castle's face, no spite in the movement, no rancor in his voice when it came. Vadim dropped to one knee and Castle hauled him back up to his feet.

"I told you once already." Castle spoke calmly, almost good-naturedly, and Beckett took a half-step forward, something dark thrashing in her chest.

"Fucking whore. She-"

"Be careful how you speak of her," Castle said quietly, his face close to Vadim's. He reached in and closed his hand around the splinted and mangled wreck of Vadim's left, crunching and shifting the bones so that Beckett could actually hear it. Vadim screamed and raged, spittle flying from his mouth, falling back against the vehicle.

"Your girlfriend is a fucking hellcat, and I hope she cuts off your dick, you ugly son of a bitch!"

Castle lifted an amused eye to Beckett and Kate's stomach flipped unexpectedly at the fierce possession on his face.

"She is a hellcat," he said, eyes sharp as his gaze raked over her. "Beautiful." And then his eyes cut back to Vadim and he twisted the man's arm behind his back and shoved him to his knees. "And she's not yours."

"I brought you in on this," Vadim snarled. "I took care of you, you asshole, and this is how you repay me? Stealing what's mine-"

"I don't think you heard me. She will never be yours. She was mine from the moment I laid eyes on her, no matter what you think or believe. Not matter how many fucking black eyes she gave you or bruises you gave her. Do you understand?"

"And so what? You will shoot me over this bitch?"

Castle's face hardened in the parking lot's security light; his grip seemed to tighten because Vadim snarled again and writhed on his knees. Kate came forward another step, but she found she didn't know what to say, didn't know what she wanted from this either.

"Shoot you? Too good for you. I will carve you up, Vadim. I will make you live the rest of your life with it."

And then Castle shifted and she saw the knife in his other hand, alive and sentient it seemed, waiting for the thrust.

"No," she got out. "No." Kate had to bite back the urge to call his name, his real name, and her hand squeezed around the butt of the rifle.

Castle looked up at her and shook his head. "I'm sorry. Not this time."

"No," she insisted, the certainty of it rising up in her. "Shoot him. Instead. Just shoot him."

Not torture him.

Castle held her gaze steadily and then dropped his eyes back to Vadim. "You're lucky she has compassion. You don't deserve it."

And then he shot Vadim between the eyes.

* * *

Castle came back to Kate who was standing just inside the doorway; she lifted her hand and pressed her palm to his stomach, her head bowed. He waited, gun in his hand, and her fingers skimmed a line of blood across his abs and then down to his waist.

"You need clothes," she said then.

He nodded, cupped his hand at her elbow as his eyes drifted over her. The tshirt was ragged and drooping down one shoulder; her feet were bare and her knees skinned as they poked out under the skirt. "It's over," he said finally.

She nodded back to that and lifted her head, gave him a smirking little twist of her lips. He'd thought - he had guessed she'd be shaken, horrified, something, but he'd forgotten this was Kate Beckett.

"Castle, you really need clothes," she murmured, and then he realized she was laughing at him. Held back, pent up, but laughing.

He narrowed his eyes and glanced down his body. "Could be."

"As wonderful a specimen as you are, super spy, I think clothes can only help our cause."

"We've got to - uh - scavenge some. Just to be presentable."

"You, sweetheart, are hardly presentable," she laughed. Her chin was tilted up towards him, her body slight but so strong, radiating heat, and he couldn't resist lowering his mouth to hers and claiming her kiss.

She wrapped her free arm around his neck and arched up into him; he dragged her body against his and fought her for control of the kiss, perfectly willing to lose. Kate growled in his mouth and nipped his bottom lip, something about _show you hellcat_ and he held her tighter to him and gave her everything he had.

"We need to get going," she whispered after a time, her forehead pressed to his. "Before we attract any more attention."

"One of these guys is still alive," he said then. "If he survives, he'll let them know it was just a fight over a woman."

"Well, Agent Castle," she murmured in his ear. "Now that you've got her, what do you plan to do with her?"

He chuckled darkly and nudged closer for another kiss. "I've always had her. No change there."

She sighed, a little laugh falling from her lips, and then she pushed him away. "Don't get excited, Castle; you're not wearing any pants."

* * *

They used the company car to put the miles between them and the wrecked motel, and Castle was keeping his eyes peeled for a drug store along the outskirts of Samara so they could get supplies. Her phone had been shot to pieces on the television stand, but thankfully his was intact. Other than that, they had next to nothing.

Clothes, first aid, food, shit, even _soap._

They couldn't drive too far; the CIA safe house was a flat in Samara just off the M5 but to show up within the city limits looking like they did was asking for trouble. Castle was wearing a hooded sweatshirt he'd found in one of Vadim's SUVs and his own ratty pants, and they'd loaded the company car with Vadim's cache of ammo and weapons, unwilling to leave it behind.

"Castle," she murmured as he cruised the lonely highway west of Samara. She was still in his tshirt and that miniskirt, and he wanted very badly to look at that 'graze' wound on her hip again; she'd bandaged it herself and he hadn't seen it close up yet.

"Yeah." He read the signs carefully, realized that he was losing focus as sleeplessness and strain and combat took their tolls on his body. He wasn't a twenty-six year old fresh from the Farm any more; he was fucking forty years old and married and why the hell was he still doing this?

"Castle," she said again, sharply.

"What?"

"You're bleeding."

He glanced over at her with a surprised laugh. "Well. So are you."

"No, I mean. . ." She leaned in and her fingers skimmed his thigh; he yelped and glanced down, saw the blood soaking through his pants.

"Shit."

"Look, up here on the right. It's a gas station. Stop here."

"I don't like gas stations," he muttered.

She snorted. "We held our own. Come on. We need to triage that leg, Castle."

"And your hip. What about that? Are you bleeding?"

She made a noncommittal noise that he knew meant _yes_ and he growled as he jerked the car into the parking space just in front of the doors.

"Let me see it, Beckett."

She shook her head. "I don't - don't think it's a good idea to take the bandage off until we get somewhere we can do something about it."

"Shit."

"Just go inside and get us supplies. Okay?"

He was going to have to stitch up her hip, wasn't he? She hadn't let him see it, the stubborn little-

"Go, Castle."

He jerked open the car door and shoved his battered hands into the front pocket of the sweatshirt to hide the blood at his thigh, and then he hunched his shoulders as he went inside.

He didn't like this at all.

* * *

Beckett tilted her head back against the seat and let out a shaky breath. It really hurt. More than she'd thought back when they were standing in the wreckage of their motel room and trying to find clothes and the keys and everything else. She'd just wanted to get out of there.

She had her arm pressed tight to her hip, trying not to think about it, but it was throbbing now, a flame of heat deep in her bone.

And Castle. She hadn't noticed how bad it was, that laceration on the top of his thigh. Not until a moment ago, when she'd looked over at him and seen the grey shade to his face near his temple, the way his lips looked parched. She'd raked her eyes over him only to discover the blood seeping through his pant leg.

She shivered as the winter wind battered its way inside the car, the heater off now and the warmth receding.

She needed to look at this before Castle came back, just so she could prepare him. Just to see how bad it was. It'd be stupid to make him drive another thirty minutes to the safe house if she was going to bleed to death before then.

But she didn't think she would. Just. A steady trickle. His leg wound had to be worse, right?

Kate glanced at her right hip and eased her elbow away from her side, licked her bottom lip as she studied the makeshift bandage. Just that damn shimmery top, strings really, and it had crusted over now. She got her thumb under a wad of material, but it started to pull at her skin where it was stuck.

She stopped.

She'd have to soak her side in water to loosen the bandage without breaking the clot. She hoped it was a clot. At the time, it had felt like her flesh had been seared with the path of the bullet, so she'd assumed it was basically closed up.

Hopefully that held true.

She leaned her head back against the seat once more and closed her eyes.

Did it never end?


	4. Chapter 4

**Close Encounters 8**

* * *

"Beckett!" he hissed, hand gripping the car door.

She jerked upright, eyes flashing open, and his heart started beating again. Castle slumped down in the driver's seat and pressed his forehead to the steering wheel, taking long gulps of air.

"Just resting," she murmured. He felt her take the plastic bags from his loose fingers, and he lifted his head once more, not sure why seeing her passed out in the seat had hit him like it had.

"Resting," he rasped.

"Just tired. It's nearly four in the morning."

"Yeah, yeah, I know," he muttered, shaking his head at himself as he tried to get the keys in the ignition. "We'll drive down the road a few kilometers and then stop and change clothes, see if we can't wipe off the blood."

"You got good stuff," she was sighing, her hands pawing through the bags of supplies he'd bought. He'd had the go-pack hidden in the company car, of course, so his cash and their IDs were safe - no trouble purchasing what they needed, but he had definitely caught the clerk's attention.

"Open a bottle of water for me and a few hundred pain reliever, will ya?" He nosed the car back out onto the access road and pressed his foot down on the gas to get it up to speed. He merged onto the M5 without a hitch and then felt her press the wet water bottle to his forearm, letting him know it was there.

"Care which brand? Looks like you got three kinds."

"I don't care," he muttered, flushing a little because, okay, he went a little overboard on the first aid stuff. "I got you sweatpants and a touristy tshirt. That ok?"

"Shoes?" she asked. "My feet are frozen solid."

"Socks and shoes both," he grinned, felt a little better about his shopping trip.

"Bless you," she breathed out. He glanced over and she was already digging the thick cotton socks out of the back and hitching her knee up to her chest with a twinge across her face. Dragging the socks onto her feet with a wince.

"Also got you a bra and underwear," he added, casting her a devilish look.

"Oh no. I'm afraid to look."

"I do an excellent job at shopping for your clothes."

"You certainly do have practice," she laughed back. "Oh, these are - um - a little modest, actually."

"All they had were granny panties. I tried. Lord knows I tried, Kate Beckett. I wanted you in black lace."

She laughed again, a light and sweet thing, and she pushed the beige underwear back into the bag. "How about a phone?"

He gritted his teeth. "They don't sell the pay-as-you-go kind. Just phone cards. Mine's functional but I picked up a charger for it; I think the battery is shot."

"Okay," she said slowly. "All right. When we stop, I'll change clothes. Not here."

"And you'll let me see that hip too."

"Maybe."

"Don't argue with me," he gritted out. "I bought thread to stitch it."

"You are _not_ putting stitches in me on the _side of the road_, Castle."

"I am if I have to."

"No. You are not."

He checked his side mirror and switched lanes, increased his speed a little more. It was late - early morning really - and he was battling back exhaustion, and maybe some blood loss if the state of his pants was any indication - but he wasn't losing this one. He was going to do whatever necessary.

"Not talking doesn't win you the argument," she muttered. "I know how you operate, Rick Castle, and there's no way in hell you're winning this one."

"You have no idea how I operate. You've never been under my knife. You know what they call me? The smooth operator."

She groaned loudly in the seat, hiding her eyes.

"You know you want to laugh. And guess what? I can field dress with the best of them. Leaves only a neat little scar."

Suddenly she was leaning over to twist his ear, growling at him. He yelped and clutched the wheel harder to keep them on the road, jerked his head away from her fierce grip.

"Ow."

"You think you're so funny," she muttered.

"I _am_ so funny. You always laugh."

"Not laughing now."

"Me either," he said darkly. He was stitching that hip.

* * *

It wasn't much more than a gully on the side of the road, but he'd angled the car to shield them. Still she hesitated, the ragged shirt pressed against her side, the throb of it making her body hot.

"You change," she said quietly, not leaving her seat.

"What?" He came back to her open car door, the bundle of new clothes in a plastic bag. "No. Come on. Kate-"

"Probably better to do this at the safe house." She held his eyes, tried to instill some certainty in them - not just that she'd be fine for now, but that it wasn't a good idea to operate on the side of the road. If she changed clothes, she'd have to peel the makeshift bandage off her hip and then. . .

"Fine," he growled. "At least wash your face and hands."

She'd already used the hand sanitizer on her arms, dug the dirt and blood out from under her nails, but she nodded tightly and took the industrial-sized bottle back from him. He was shucking off the sweatshirt and tossing it into her lap, and she watched him silently, let him fume in that solitary, jaw-working way. She'd hear it later, that she knew for sure.

Castle's chest was a mess of criss-crossing scrapes and the bleeding lines of lacerations, but she resisted the urge to do something about those. If hers could wait, so could his.

He tugged a clean black shirt over his head and damn if some cheap, convenience store tshirt didn't look fantastic on him, the hard set of his face echoed in the steel of his eyes and the chiseled frame of his body. He was unbuttoning his pants now and easing one leg down; she saw the puckered slash on top of his thigh as he undressed.

She sucked in a breath, but he reached for the sanitizer and she gave it up wordlessly. He liberally coated his hands with it, rubbing dirt and blood off, and then he grit his teeth and squeezed out the gel onto his thigh.

He cursed and closed his eyes, a hissed breath through his teeth.

Kate grabbed the sanitizer before he could drop it, reaching forward just far enough to catch it, and then Castle growled and opened his eyes, smeared the gel across his thigh. The blood mixed and turned a strange fuschia, like neon against his skin, but she handed over clean gauze and he used that to blot the area.

She wanted to get her hands on him, but there was no way he was letting her.

Castle stripped without comment and dug into the bag for underwear and clean pants. She watched, she didn't speak, and he was done in moments.

He got back behind the wheel without talking, and she sat hunched into her side as a wave of exhaustion came over her.

He was already pulling them back onto the interstate and pushing the car further into the darkness.

* * *

Castle unlocked the door to the third floor condo, going quietly in deference to their neighbors. Kate was right behind him, the plastic bags ruffling as they moved, and the moment he saw the clean lines of the kitchen and the stack of fresh sheets and towels on the counter, he knew she'd been right.

No surgery on the side of the road when fifteen more minutes meant a shower and a clean body and the light and time to do it right.

He turned around and took the bags from her, dropped them on the floor even as she was locking the door. He slung the duffle bag of ammo and guns off his shoulder and left it on the floor as well, watched Kate carefully as she stood in the entry.

"All right. First thing - get a look at your hip."

She nodded, didn't even protest, and he grit his teeth and cupped his hands under her elbows, guided her into the living room. They stood there a moment in the warm, dark room, a nightlight on somewhere down the hall, and her lashes parted as she lifted her eyes to him.

"I think a bath," she said finally. "Soak the bandage; it's - stuck."

"Okay," he murmured, fingers stroking the smooth skin behind her elbows.

"Both of us," she whispered. "Your thigh-"

"No, honey," he said quietly. "Can't stay in the bath long. Just soak it and get out, get it looked at before we do anything more."

She studied him, looking for a weakness he knew, but he wasn't giving over on this point. Her fingers fluttered to his sides and tucked in at the waistband of his pants as if to hold on.

"Come on," he said then. "Let me see it."

She sighed out then, but she turned away from him and walked towards the soft, golden light down the hall, looking like she was trying not to hunch, her elbow pressed into her side at her hip. Castle went back for the bags of stuff and gathered what he needed, and then he followed her to the bathroom.

* * *

Kate adjusted the temperature as the bath ran, leaning against the tub and watching the roar of water. She'd come down hard from the adrenaline dumped into her blood, and now she felt her fingers quiver and her thighs trembling, saw the hazy black at the edges of her vision.

Castle appeared in the bathroom and shut off the water, sank down on his knees next to her. "I'm picking you up," he warned, and then he scooped her up and deposited her in the tub, ratty clothes and all.

The heat of the water soaked through and made her shiver, but it felt good, made her body slowly uncoil, and Castle was easing the skirt down her hips, a hand gripping her bicep as he worked. She rocked to one side to help, felt the way she listed into the tub and couldn't stop herself.

"Okay," he murmured, flinging the wet skirt to the floor. "Now the shirt."

He seemed to be unsure of what to do next, so Kate snagged the hem of his tshirt, the one he'd thrown to her back in that motel room, and she lifted it up and over her head, felt its stiff side where the blood had dried. Castle took it from her, and she smiled to herself at the way his eyes avoided looking, and then she turned slightly in the tub so they could both get at her hip.

"A little more water," she said, nudging the makeshift bandage. It was still attached by her own crusted blood, and she didn't relish this. "Soak it."

Castle had already cupped his hands in the bath and now he poured the water over her side, the heat of it making her skin ripple. She eased her shoulder against the back of the tub and closed her eyes for a second, let him pour water over the wound as it flared brightly to life.

"You okay?"

"Fine."

He didn't call her on it; he just worked his fingers now into the soaked bandage of her old shirt, carefully peeling it back. She breathed in slowly through her nose and clutched the rim of the bathtub with one hand.

"Not bad," he said softly. "Bleeding stopped."

"No shit," she grunted, opening her eyes.

He laughed at that and she gave him an answering smile, glanced down at the graze. It wasn't really that bad, but the blood had welled up fresh when he'd taken the last of the bandage away.

"You'll have to," she muttered.

"Yeah," he agreed. "I bought thread."

"Sewing thread?"

"Well, no. Dental floss actually."

She laughed at that, a kind of desperate chuckle that made her whole body shake, and he grinned back at her even as his eyes had an edge to them that meant he knew. He knew she was holding on for dear life.

"Dental floss," she muttered finally. "Okay, then. Let's get this show on the road." She pushed her hands under her and sat up straighter, let the ache in her hip have its ugly way with her. Castle was already reaching in and gathering her against his chest, lifting her out of the tub even though it _had_ to hurt like a bitch. His thigh - his _back_.

He put her down on a clean towel; she hadn't even noticed when he'd spread it out. His hand was firm at her leg and he was squeezing the edges of the wound together, making her grunt and slap his chest.

"I gotta clean it," he said softly.

"Does it have to hurt?" she grunted. She curled her fingers around his bicep and let him make the wound weep, the fluid running clear at least, the blood thin and not as bad as she'd thought. "Bring on the dental floss."

He chuckled, his breath right at her ear. "I left it in the bedroom. You can lie down in there; be easier on us both. I'm going to numb it while I clean myself up, okay?"

She nodded and got to her feet, swaying as the sudden shift made her dizzy; his hand was already there, letting her get her balance, and she walked with him back out into the bedroom.

The ice was already in freezer bags and ready for her, everything laid out and neatly organized. A bowl of what smelled like rubbing alcohol, the needle and floss still in their packages, even her clean clothes - she longed for clean clothes. She crawled onto the bed and sank down onto her good side, let out a long breath as she gave herself over to him.

"It'll burn when it's numb," he told her. He had a hand at her ribs, fingers reaching around to her spine; his thumb brushed the skin, distraction against the sudden heaviness of the ice pack at her hip.

The ice actually felt good, and she closed her eyes. "I'm okay."

"I'll be right back." His hand brushed down her arm, a kiss on her cheek that felt entirely too domestic for four o'clock in the morning in Russia after a shoot-out with a brute. But _nice_. Sweet, as only Castle could be - that strange combination of fierce and gentle.

She felt him lay a blanket over her legs for warmth, and she smiled into the bedspread, reached back to catch him before he could leave. "Thanks."

"Just be a second." He squeezed her fingers and let her go, and she watched him over her shoulder as he moved back into the bathroom.

Then she dropped her head back to the pillow and closed her eyes.

* * *

She'd fallen asleep when he came back to the bed, her hair a tangled knot at her neck and her arms curled into her bare chest. He took the ice off her hip and she shivered, but her eyes fluttered and opened, staring at nothing for a moment longer than he liked.

"Kate."

"Mm, tired."

"Yeah, me too," he admitted. "You ready?"

"Yeah," she sighed. One of her arms untangled and she reached out for his wrist, still at her hip, her fingers closing around him. "Go ahead. I'm fine."

"It's numb?"

"Yeah."

He nodded and ignored the flush of her body, focused instead on the angry welt of ragged skin that seared across her hip bone.

It wasn't as bad as he'd feared; the graze itself was only a couple inches, no more than three, and it'd be easy to stitch. No problem at all - he'd done worse on himself.

"Castle, stop stalling."

He huffed out a breath and reached over her to grab the needle, still in its package, ripped it open. He dropped it in the bowl of alcohol, then broke open the casing on the dental floss and unspooled it, putting it in the alcohol as well.

He used the hand sanitizer once more, liberally smearing it over her hip, her muscles and skin contracting and flinching as it hit her nerves. He worked quickly, not too fast but enough so that he was already threading the needle when she let out a low hiss of pain.

"Burns," he said.

"Yes," she gritted out.

Castle made the knot at the end and put a guiding hand to her hip, mentally mapped the procedure beofre starting. And then he tucked the needle into her unmarred skin, little wide of the wound, and began stitching it closed.

"Feels so weird," she said suddenly, her voice coming as if from far off. "Ow."

He pressed his lips together to keep the smile off his face, saying _ow_ in the middle of getting field stitched and a bullet wound on top of it. He worked expertly, not stopping even when she flinched and shifted as if to move away. He put a stilling hand to her leg and gripped her harder and she stopped, but her breath caught at the next tug.

The numbing from the ice was wearing off. He'd looked for that gum-numbing oral gel in the convenience store, but they'd been rather short on baby supplies. Go figure.

She hissed and he held her down with his elbow, used an expert knot at the end of it, and cut it with nail clippers. He dumped the stuff in a plastic bag and moved the bowl of alcohol off the bed then grabbed the flat, white gauze pad to lay over the stitches.

"Almost done," he promised, pressing down the corners of the bandage with surgical tape. Her skin was cool to the touch from the ice, but the color had flushed back under his fingers. He leaned in and feathered a kiss below the bandage, felt the flicker of her muscle in reaction. "Okay, sweetheart, you're good to go."

"You next," she murmured, but her words were slurred. Her hand came back to curl at his ear and he laid his cheek against her flank, closed his eyes a moment.

"I will."

Her figners skimmed his jaw before her palm fell heavily at his face. "Let me look?"

"You're about to fall asleep," he laughed softly. He was half on the bed and half off, a foot on the floor to give him balance, but she wasn't the only one about to fall asleep.

"No," she sighed out, but if not sleep, then she at least needed to stay right there and rest. Her thumb brushed his ear. "No."

But he didn't move, and she didn't either, and he wrapped an arm loosely around her hips and concentrated on the sound of her breathing and the settling of the old apartment building as it withstood the Russian wind, and the slow tilt and slide of the world in its orbit.

"At least crawl up with me," she murmured.

He could, actually, do that. The moment his head hit the pillow beside hers, she was nudging into his arms and pressing her nose to his tshirt. Castle slipped his knee between hers and she hummed, a little smile on her lips. And so he drifted off into sleep with her.

* * *

She woke with his arm slung around her shoulders and his chin digging into the top of her head. She was cold despite this, and she realized she was naked, the blanket only covering her feet.

Kate loosened his hold and sat up, felt the room spin a moment before she could get her bearings. Her hip ached and she needed some tylenol, needed clothes, but she needed to get a look at the wound on his thigh too.

Her clean clothes were right at the foot of the bed, so she slipped from Castle's side and grabbed them. She checked the alarm clock - nearly six - and stood slowly to pull the underwear up. She had to roll the waistband to keep it away from the bandage, and then she eagerly worked her legs into sweatpants.

She looked at Castle over her shoulder; he was dead to the world and his face looked still looked exhausted. The shirt came on over her head easily enough - she didn't even try to put the bra on - and she adjusted the neckline as she leaned back into the mattress to study Castle closer.

His injured thigh must not be bleeding any longer because the sweatpants he'd changed into were still clean. But as she looked, she saw the slivers of shrapnel and debris embedded in the skin of his arms, wondered what his chest and legs looked like. He'd been crouching in the wreckage of that motel room, fighting off Vadim's idiots, and she was afraid his whole body was riddled with cuts.

She put her hand on his thigh and rubbed slowly at the material of his sweatpants, loath to wake him but wanting to get a look at the cut on his leg. His sweats were loose and she wondered if she could somehow. . .

No. She'd wake him for sure and sleep was necessary. She pressed her fingers a little harder to his thigh and still didn't feel that teltalle wetness of blood.

He'd cleaned it on the side of the road; he'd seen for himself how deep it might be. She trusted his survival training; she trusted that he wouldn't be stupid about it either. If he felt safe enough to fall asleep, she had to let it go.

For now.

Kate crawled back into his arms, bringing the blanket with her.

* * *

When he woke sweating, he knew it wasn't good.

She was already awake, caressing his face with her fingers, her body still close and a blanket pulled up around them, trapping their body heat. He hoped it was just that, but she looked concerned.

"You okay?" she murmured.

He nodded into her touch and pushed the blanket off, felt every hard jar his body had taken. "In your words. . .Ow."

A flicker of a smile on her face, but she was still cradling his cheek, rubbing her fingers at his ear in that way that made him want to burrow deep inside her.

"Your skin feels hot," she said then. "I think you need to let me look at you."

"I cleaned the one on my leg."

"I know, sweetheart, but you've got cuts all over you." Her fingers traced the shell of his ear and into his hair.

"Think it's just the blanket. And you. You're hot."

She did smile at that, but the determination was all over her face. He sighed and rolled onto his back; he still felt grimy and exhausted. Something hurt.

"Come on, Castle. You can take a shower."

He snaked his arm under her neck and pulled her closer; he didn't want to move just yet even though a shower sounded good.

"You can't shower," he sighed. "Not with the stitches. Or well - how about we can be really careful."

"You're kinda taking it for granted that I'm coming in with you."

"Well, aren't you?" He turned his head to look at her, saw the roll of her eyes. That was his favorite expression on her face - that eye-roll. Oh, no, actually, he loved when she smiled so hard it looked like everything was breaking free.

"Hmm, suppose so. But maybe a bath instead?"

"Oh, well. . .okay." He nudged his nose into her temple and sighed. But then the image of her naked body in the bath tub and her inspection of _his_ naked body and the heat of the water and. . .

Yeah.

"Bath time?" he asked, lifting his head and propping up on his elbows over her. He wriggled his eyebrows and she laughed softly, her fingers coming up to stroke at his forehead, into his hair, back.

"Bath time."

* * *

He growled at her again and shied away from her touch. Kate laughed and came after him, snapping the waistband of his sweatpants. "It wasn't that bad."

"You just dug a piece of shrapnel out of my ass," he muttered. "It wasn't bad for you, maybe."

"You do have a nice ass," she sighed, grinning at him again. She wanted him to lie back down on the bed but he kept dodging her. He was wet from the bath and his hair was falling in his eyes and getting wavy at his neck and one butt cheek was still raw-looking after she'd pulled out that long sliver of porcelain, and yet - he still looked stunningly provocative.

And irritated. Irritated and simply _male_.

And she was being completely unbiased here, really. The long and hard lines of his body laid over with ropy muscle, the strength of his thighs and the force of his arms - she badly wanted him. In bed with her.

To sleep, unfortunately. Just to sleep.

"Come on, quit whining and get in bed."

He was shrugging on those sweatpants like he was going somewhere. "My ass _hurts_."

"I can kiss it better," she promised, lowering her lashes. Her flirting wasn't even that good, as exhausted and punch-drunk as she was, but he still drifted closer to her like she'd called him by name, distractedly reaching for his tshirt.

"I should make contact. Phone's charged."

"After we've slept," she bargained. "They can reach us if they need us."

She knew they shouldn't, that protocol dictated contact as soon as was feasible, but in her mind, it wasn't feasible. They needed time, and he'd already sent the information on to the CIA, and now it was _their_ time.

She saw she had him when he didn't try to tug his shirt on over his head, just let it dangle from his fingers. She was only wearing a tshirt herself, and her hipbone felt like it'd been split with an ax, but she approached him like he was a wounded animal and waited for him to meet her eyes.

"Just a few more hours. Until noon or so. Give us time to rest."

He sighed and his shoulders slumped; exhaustion stamped into every line of his face, making him suddenly look so very old. She didn't like it. Kate pressed closer to him and wrapped her arms around his waist, heedless of the way her hip flared with movement, and she hugged him tightly.

He dropped his cheek to her head and held her for a moment more. "Okay," he said. "All right. Sleep for now."


	5. Chapter 5

**Close Encounters 8**

* * *

Beckett didn't know what had woken her, only that it took her body a long time to figure out what and where. There was strange sunlight dimmed by thick curtains across the windows, and even when she closed her eyes again, she could feel the tentative touch of morning light.

She remembered then.

The safe house.

She was cold, curled up on her good side with her hip throbbing dully. She'd been pushed out of a good sleep and she struggled to get back there, but she was dragged inexorably towards awareness.

She opened her eyes and saw Castle sitting in an armchair before the windows. His body was in the shadow made by the chair, the light in a corona around him that made it impossible to see him clearly. She watched him as she oriented, his steepled fingers and the brush of a forearm and the darkness shrouding his face.

Kate stirred and uncurled her fingers from her chest, shifted as she swallowed against the dryness in her mouth. "Castle?"

Behind her, movement, a body warm and shifting into her in the bed.

For one terrible moment, she had no idea, no concept, and then everything broken in her understanding coalesced sharply, painfully. Who that was. Watching her. In the chair. In their room.

She jerked upright and reached for her gun, but it was gone, her hand slapping bare wood. Beside her, Castle groaned awake and turned to her, but she was already scrambling over him for the automatic on his side, panic making a tight fist around her heart so that she felt her knee crunch against his shoulder and then his hand at her thigh, steady but also confused.

"Kate?" he muttered, and she had her fingers around the gun and then _He_ was talking.

"Good morning. I have something for you."

Under her, Castle growled and lifted her off of him even as he wrapped his hand around hers on the gun. He was getting to his feet, which dragged her out of bed as well, and he raised their joined hands around the automatic to aim for the man in the chair.

His father.

* * *

Their fingers were tangled over the trigger and he couldn't make it work, couldn't pull it because Kate was in the way. But he didn't dare let Black know that.

Castle was in sweatpants and Kate in just a tshirt at his back, but she had a death grip in his waistband and had moved to stand beside him, and he really didn't like the way Black was looking at her.

At all.

"What the hell are you _playing_ at?" he snarled.

Black remained seated in the chair, and now Castle saw the Sig balanced on his knee but his hands not near it. Some of the panic seemed to dump out of Beckett at that moment, because she swayed and her grip tightened and shit, her hip, the stitches, were they bleeding again?

"I have something for you," Black said again. "If you'll give me a moment of your time."

"No. Out. I want you out or I will fucking shoot you."

Kate's nails scraped his side but he didn't even _care_ if that was dissent. Fuck it. This time he wasn't letting Black bully them.

"I have something that relates to your mission."

"What?" Kate said, answering before Castle could make his demand again. He shifted in annoyance beside her to let her know that wasn't okay, but her thumb pressed hard into his hip even as his father sat forward in the chair.

Castle flinched as the light fell on his face. Black's nose was crooked and a knot had formed between his eyes where it had set wrong after Castle had broken it. His left eye drooped, the white was bloodshot, and now that Castle was looking, he saw that Black's hand on his thigh was mangled.

He'd done a lot of damage to his father.

"What do you have about this mission?" Kate repeated.

Castle's eyes met his father's and Black seemed to want to pause there, let the weight of all that had been done settle heavily back into both of them.

His father was a wrecked man.

Well, too damn bad.

Black was wrecked but apparently still wily and cold-hearted enough to find them here and take the Sig from the bedside table and then watch Kate sleep. Fuck. Castle really wanted to shoot him. He trembled with a violence so brutal and passionate and burning that he didn't think he could aim straight if it came to it. This was nothing like Vadim. This was _personal._

This went to the core of him. And her. And what they wanted for their life together.

"The CIA is wrong about Vadim. He wasn't the one shipping out reprocessed plutonium. He wasn't the one supplying that arms dealer. Or at least - he wasn't in charge."

Castle took in a harsh breath and battled once more for control of the automatic. But Kate didn't let go of it either.

"Then who?" Beckett asked. "Who is?"

"You'll give me a moment of your time," Black said.

"You've already had your moment," Castle growled back, advancing now and his finger twisting around hers to get to the trigger. But Beckett stayed with him and his advance meant hers as well, and he had to stop - had to - because there was no way in hell he was bringing Kate closer to Black.

"One moment. Give me six hours, Richard. Alone. You'll want to hear what I have to say. About everything. Because the mission isn't complete."

"No," Kate said, and this time her grip on his waistband loosened and her fingers pressed flat to his ribs. "No, Castle. Not alone."

He gritted his teeth and studied Black, but the man revealed nothing. Castle tightened his hand around the butt of the automatic but Kate didn't release it to his control.

Damn it.

"Okay. Six hours."

* * *

No.

"Castle," she hissed. God, she felt like shit and he was _leaving_ her to run off with his father somewhere she didn't even _know_ and this was not okay.

"It's fine," he said back tightly. "I won't let him leave my sight. You'll be fine."

"Not me," she growled, shoving on his shoulder. "It's you I'm worried about. He's - who knows what the hell he's really got going on."

"But it's never been his plan to kill me," he rasped.

_Unlike you._

She clenched her fists and stepped farther back inside the bathroom. Castle stood in the doorway, his weapon at his thigh but his eyes on his father in the chair, and Kate had moved off to one side so she couldn't see.

She was hiding. Fuck.

No. Not today. She stepped into view once more and Castle's eyes slid to hers with a panic in them that she knew and had tasted herself but she could handle this. She could.

"You're not going with him," she said quietly, trying to even out her voice. "It's a very bad idea."

"You're the one who wanted to ask questions and not just fucking shoot him."

She stiffened and stepped back, struggled to push down her reaction and _think_. Stop reacting. Plan, be smart. Don't let Black win.

"Kate, if he's with me, then I know he's not with you."

She pressed her lips tighter together and met his eyes. How worried he was for her, how deeply he ached over this. Even still. Even after therapy and their endless conversations and how they'd come back stronger for it, made up for it with love.

"Don't shoot him," she sighed. Because it was the right thing to do, because her mother had strong convictions about right and wrong and giving the law its full power and weight and might to go after criminals. And only the law. "Don't kill him."

"I want to."

"I know." And she wanted him to. It was so bright a mirage in her that she could almost taste the cold, crystal, clear waters of vengeance.

But Black was sitting in their bedroom, at their mercy, and he might actually have real information.

"I don't like this," she said again, crossing her arms over her chest with a shiver. "I don't like you going off with him. And what - how do I know you're okay?"

"You know because he's only ever wanted this life for me. The CIA. Be the fantastic machine he created me to be. He wants me to finish the mission, Kate. He may try to break me, but he won't kill me. Not his creation."

You don't know that, she thought desperately.

"Whatever information he has, whatever he needs to show me - I'll come back here. I promise I will come get you. You'll have the guns, we'll reprogram the alarm, set up the monitors this time, and you'll be safe."

"It's not about me," she growled, her panic cresting once more and overturning all reason. "It's about you and _him_ and fuck, ok, maybe it is about me too, because I can't do this. I can't. Don't leave me here without knowing where you are and if you're even alive. Don't do that to me again."

His mouth dropped open.

But now she had him. She had him in a way that rationally and calmly explaining her side hadn't managed, and now that the rising edge of her hysteria seemed to have broken free of what ragged control she had, she couldn't and wouldn't stop.

"You did it before. You left me because he told you to and I can't survive that again. I thought you were dead. You let me believe you were dead." She hunched forward and pressed her hand to her chest, that place where the bullet wound in her back nearly came through so that her heart felt it like a spear had pinned her there.

When she could meet his eyes again, everything in him had broken. He looked sick. "I'm sorry. Kate, I'm so sorry."

She frowned and pressed harder to keep back tears, like her grief came from that place in her chest. "No, I don't - I only mean to say. . .I don't want to repeat the same mistakes. I don't want to go back there; I don't think I'd survive it."

He shook his head, his mouth open and working but no sound coming out. She didn't meant to make him cry, hadn't meant to go back there, but he couldn't keep making these decisions unilaterally, without her.

She took the first step towards him and then he was wrapping his arm around her so tightly, his chin tucked in near her temple, and she reached for his gun hand, wrapped her fingers around his wrist. Whatever happened, she was with him.

"I don't want him anywhere near you," he whispered then, his voice choked and tight.

"I know, I know," she whispered. "I don't much want him near me either. But here he is. And we do this together."

"If he-"

"You won't let him. I won't let him. It won't happen if we do this together."

"We're good together," he rasped. "Damn good."

"Not damned," she said back quickly, turning her nose into his cheek and kissing him softly. "Blessed. More than blessed by having you. Being with you."

He cleared his throat and she realized suddenly that he'd formed a shield around her, that his arm held her in and his head blocked her from his father's view, that his body had canted into hers and kept her upright long enough for her to regain her strength of will and stand on her own.

"I love you," she whispered at his ear. "No matter any of this. Even if you had left me here. I'd still love you."

"I won't leave you," he said fiercely. "You're right. We don't play by his rules. We make our own."

She nodded and released his gun hand, brought her arms around his waist instead. Let his father see. Let Black know.

Couldn't break them. He could never break them.

* * *

Castle waited with the gun in his hand as Beckett cleaned up and got dressed in the bathroom. They had agreed, unspoken, to not let Black know about the extent of their injuries, even though the man could clearly see that Castle was battered. But the bullet graze at her hip, the long gash in his thigh - best not to give the man any advantage.

His father had said nothing when Castle announced that _alone_ wouldn't be possible, had said nothing when Beckett trained the automatic on Black while Castle had quickly gotten dressed and packed up. And now that he and Castle were, actually, alone, his father still hadn't spoken.

He didn't know why. The man he'd known would have tried to smooth talk his way into a better situation. Of course, the man Castle had thought he'd known would never have tried to murder his wife.

So he didn't know this man at all. Not really. And Kate was right - better they stick together, just in case.

Beckett opened the bathroom door and came smoothly out into the bedroom. Her hair was wet and pulled back off her neck, a touch of make up around her eyes (he'd been so damn proud of himself for thinking of it, back in that convenience store, of finding eye liner and mascara and buying them for her; she hadn't even mentioned it, but the fact that she wore it now made him feel strong for knowing).

She nodded at him and he nudged the duffle bag with his foot. She bent down and took it, slinging it over her shoulder with a tight grimace, and he shot a look to his father. Black didn't seem to take in the wince in Beckett's face or the stiffness in her posture, and so Castle stood as well.

"The Sig," he mentioned, nodding to it.

Black spread his hands wider and gave him a slow smile. But the charm didn't work anymore; it was twisted on his face because of the scarring; it wouldn't fool anyone. "You can have it back, Kate."

Castle fought hard to not let that get to him and he slowly turned to his wife, asked her without asking. She nodded and walked quickly over to Black and took the Sig from his thigh before anyone else could move.

He thought Black looked surprised. Castle was - her confidence and smoothness settled something in him.

Castle reached out with his free hand and taking his wife's, lacing their fingers together even though it impeded his movement.

He had this feeling that Black wasn't going to be a physical threat to either of them. The rigid way he held himself in the chair, his lack of conversation, the tick of his finger against his thigh - a mannerism he'd never have conscioused last year, when he was whole. Black wasn't at the top of his game, and coming out of hiding now was costing him.

So why was he here?

"Stand up, Black. Time to go," Castle said finally.

There was an odd beat where his father did nothing at all, and then the man leaned forward and placed that gnarled hand on his knee and pushed off. The weakness was evident in every movement and beside him, Kate sucked in a breath and squeezed his hand harder.

But Black got to his feet and gestured towards the front door. "Richard. My conveyance or yours?"

* * *

In the end, Castle and Beckett followed Black in his vehicle while they maintained control of their own. She didn't like being that vulnerable to the man, him sitting in the front seat alone with Castle or in the back where no one could keep an eye on him, and with his compact European car just ahead of them, she felt safer.

She didn't _like_ the feeling, but she wasn't going to deny that Black affected her. Denying it was a path that led to more trouble than they could afford.

Castle followed at a distance, Black taking them back to Mayak and the nuclear industrial complex. When they passed the first sign warning of contaminated groundwater, he reached out and took her hand, brought it against his side in a quick squeeze.

She didn't let go, but she didn't say anything either.

It was her responsibility that they were here, following his father rather than burying him. She'd kept Castle from pulling the trigger because, in her world, that didn't solve anything. But maybe it did in his.

Maybe she'd been wrong.

This was stuff for the therapist and two weeks off to decompress, but they didn't have that time. They were in the middle of Russia heading for a nuclear power plant and a group of people selling reprocessed plutonium to the highest bidder. There wasn't time.

They had to do the best they could.

"We've been doing this for a year," he said suddenly, his voice odd in the warm sunlight that poured through the car. "You and me together without him. Why now?"

"Why approach us now?" she asked. "You mean. . .you think he's been out here too. Active."

"He's _here_. In Mayak. With information about a sensitive mission. He has to be active."

Fuck. She hadn't thought of that. "I assumed he. . ."

"What? Was following us?"

"Maybe. Spying on us."

Castle gripped her hand a little harder and let go to change lanes. "Could be. But this looked more like complete reluctance. He didn't want to have to approach me, but he had to. For the sake of the mission."

"He's mission active," she stated flatly, sick horror churning in her stomach. "This whole time. The deal was that he retired. He went _away_, Castle. He wasn't supposed to be active."

Castle sucked in a tight breath. "The Director."

She gave him a look, saw the tinge of fatalistic knowledge in the dark cast of his eyes, a slate grey that said he meant business. "The Director," she repeated. "He did this. It was him. He had a job for Black to do, a perfect opportunity to use his recovery time to get him off the radar. And then. . ."

"And then," Castle said grimly. "Shit." He smacked the steering wheel with his palm and then gripped it harder, his teeth grinding. She swallowed and stared down at her hands in her lap, her heart beating too fast.

"He's been on something then," she mused out loud. "He's found something related, or this has been his baby all along - and what? He requested you be put on this?"

"How did you get out here ahead of me?" Castle asked. "When did that happen?"

"It was when you left me in Rome and went to Minsk. They needed a woman in place to be his girl."

"Did you volunteer?"

"I was assigned," she said tightly. "Why?"

"Him. It was him."

"The Director?"

"No," he growled. "My fucking father. He fucking arranged this whole thing. For you to go ahead of me. Set you up with Vadim, that sick fuck."

He was beating the heel of his hand against the steering wheel and cursing. His speed increased and the distance between him and Black's vehicle narrowed to a few yards.

"I don't see how." She pressed her lips together and shook her head. "Castle, calm down. It's not possible. He couldn't have been in control of things from the operation end in Rome. It wasn't - none of it was set up like that. I knew all the guys in that room. It was Mason and Mitchell, first of all, and Deleware-"

"Deleware? What the fuck was Deleware doing in Rome?"

She paused, her mouth open, but really. . .even if Deleware _was_ Black's inside man, he hadn't the time to get anything accomplished. "Del's not senior enough to order me to do anything, Castle. There's no way your father arranged it."

But Castle shook his head. She had no argument against his very real, very dark. . .wound. That's what it was, a twisted and gnarled piece of Castle's own soul, malformed by his father from the beginning.

Black had built the ultimate machine, and in doing so, he'd made Castle into something - less. But it'd been one case that had changed something in him, or as he had said it, widened the crack into a rift - a chasm. One case - the Chinese spy and her. Kate. Working with her had changed him.

Castle would never again be that cold, unemotional machine. Never. And he was so much better for it, so much _more_. While it had taken Kate Beckett entirely too long to believe that - that she actually had helped to free this man she loved - there was one person who would never believe the Castle was better now than before.

His father.

"If he orchestrated this. . ." Castle growled.

"We'll deal with that if we come to it," she answered. "We see what he's got now, how his mission intersects with ours. Remember what King said?"

He still clenched the steering wheel too tightly, but he did loosen his jaw. "I remember."

"Black's only ever wanted service to the CIA. That's his end game - always has been. It's not about me. It's not about you. It's about that one shining thing. Perfect, power-hungry service. And the rest gets twisted from there."

"He can't have you," Castle said roughly, reaching out again and taking her hand, clutching hard. "He can't have - he won't take you away from me."

"I'm not a toy being snatched from a child," she said softly. "I'm not going anywhere."

Castle nodded, a sharp jerk of his chin, but she saw he wasn't comforted. Not at all.

Well. Neither was she.

* * *

The road spooled out into a wild oblivion, the dark line of the pavement against the dawn-lightened sky, and just when Castle was losing patience, his father turned off onto a goat track that wound its way amidst the scrub brush.

Their company car had four-wheel drive, but it sat a little too low to the ground for the ride to be comfortable; Beckett clutched the door handle and held on. He gripped the wheel harder to keep it from twisting out of his control and followed his father's obviously modified vehicle deeper into the desert-like wilderness.

Where the track ended were the hunched shoulders of a rock formation and the bare, gnarled trees local to this region. Castle stopped the car behind Black's, but he didn't get out to help his father. The older man carefully removed the screen from before the entrance to a cave, dragging away thick underbrush and what looked to be more trees with an awkward, painstaking movement that knotted something in Castle's chest.

He'd been over this before; he'd been the one who had been a victim for so much of his life. King had set him straight again, helped him along the path that Kate Beckett herself had showed to him: life could be rich, life could be good and full and right if he let it.

He let it. He _had_ let it. His father's frailties now, whatever they might be, however real or put upon they were, those were nothing to Castle. Only more casualties in a war the two men had been waging since Castle had stood up for himself.

And that had started long before he met Beckett, even if his father didn't believe that.

"Rick," she said quietly.

He came back to the moment and put the car in gear again, followed his father's disappearing taillights into the black mouth of the cave.

He had Kate. They were in this together, no matter what.


	6. Chapter 6

**Close Encounters 8**

* * *

When they stopped the car right behind his father's, the silence in the cave was deep. Beckett took a breath and got out of the car, forcing her leg to move despite the ache that had settled deep into her hipbone. The graze throbbed where Castle had stitched it together, but it wasn't hot, so no infection. At least there was that.

Castle himself looked primed and ready for action, on the balls of his feet as he moved deeper into the cave, a hand gesturing for her. She came to his side and he brushed his fingers at her waist in both guidance and question, and she nodded to let him know she was fine.

They had driven into a shallow and wide cave behind Black's own vehicle, but the light didn't reach past the covering that the man was, even now, scraping back in front of the entrance. An SUV would never clear the roof, the fit was that tight, and Castle was pressing her close to their car as Black moved deeper into the cave.

"Come on, son."

Castle stayed where he was, his hand at her uninjured hip to keep her there, some kind of childish and stubborn line he'd drawn. Because his father had called him son?

"Get over it, Castle," she hissed quietly and pushed past him to follow. Playing these stupid games only gave the man that much more power over them.

Castle caught up to her and pulled ahead, putting himself between her and Black in the darkness, and she was disgusted by how grateful she felt, how much instantly safer it seemed to not have that yawning chasm of black between her and. . .Black.

His name was so damn fitting.

A light suddenly blazed from the left, and she could see the outline of Black's malformed body as it went slowly down a branching corridor of rock. Castle followed, and she went after them, a sudden sense of claustrophobia swamping her.

The end of the tunnel widened into a cathedral, arching rock and stalagtites that seemed to melt from the ceiling. She thought she saw bats, high up in the vaulted reaches of stone where the shadows from the klieg lamps couldn't penetrate.

Black in his bat cave.

She stepped into his lair and came up at Castle's side, wiped her sweat-slicked palms on the legs of her sweatpants, and let herself look around.

The cave was a work space: a portable generator was running quietly to one side while the light stands in each corner threw the place in sharp relief. To the right, a fold-out table was pushed perpindicular to a white screen that hung from the rock, a laptop hooked up to a digital projector and showing now a satellite image.

Mayak, from what she could see, but it was in real time.

Black was at the laptop, fiddling with a search program, and Beckett shifted her eyes to the other side of the cave. A second table had been set up where images and reports were spread out and stacked and collected, neat and industrious. A corkboard had been propped up against the rock wall and showed a riot of colors - starting with black on the left and moving towards yellow on the right, but red and green mixed in the middle, some kind of pictographic timeline.

It looked like a psychotic man's version of her murder board at the 12th.

Castle took in a breath at her side and stepped forward into the center of the cave. She followed more slowly, still surveying the work. Not only the two tables, but in the center of the room a computer was set up on a desk with its CPU running noisily, a printer attached that was, even now, spitting out information. Castle moved towards it, bending over to read.

Beckett drifted towards the far table, away from Black, and let her fingers skim the manilla file folders there, reading the labels. Dates, all of them, and they started three months before she had arrived in Mayak and came up to the present. She opened one at random and saw surveillance photos.

Of Vadim.

"What is this?" Castle asked from the center of the cave, his voice hard but curious despite himself. He was scanning the print-outs now and holding up another notebook of what looked to be field notes, not looking at his father.

Black turned away from the table where he was working and moved towards Castle, but Kate saw him spot her standing at the table and he froze for one cold, terrible instant.

Kate froze too, her rabbit heart stuttering, the slick coolness of the photo under her fingers.

Black's gaze seemed to bore straight through her chest like a bullet. And then he had reached Castle and that look was gone from his face, completely wiped clean, but she knew.

She dropped her eyes back to the stacks of file folders, the dates so carefully printed, the photos and reports inside. She scrambled for the one labeled with Friday's date, and she flipped it open.

Fuck. There she was. On her knees in front of Vadim, her hand against her bruised cheek and murder in her eyes.

Her hands shook as she rifled through the photos. All of it was here. The time he'd shoved her against a cafe table and nearly broken her arm; the day he'd discovered someone at the factory was clocking in and not showing up for work and he'd taken it out on her. Everything. What she'd had to do to get close to him, how she'd touched him, how he'd touched her.

"Beckett, come look at this," Castle called out.

She pressed her hand to her chest and closed her eyes, her back to them in the center of the cave.

"Agent Beckett," Black said calmly. "You might want to see this."

She could hear it in his voice, hear everything in his voice. _Not now, not now, he cannot know this right now._

He was right. His father was right.

Because his father had been there, here; he'd been in Mayak the whole time.

Agent Black had been her back-up.

She closed the file folder and pushed the whole week's worth of surveillance photos underneath a different stack, and then she turned around to face both men.

She could not let him know.

* * *

Castle spread the satellite images out in front of his wife and tapped the shadowed region in the far left corner of the photo nearest them. "See this? What do you think that is?"

Kate pushed her hair back and studied the image; she looked a little more fragile than he liked. Not so that anyone would notice - though he wouldn't put it past his father - but just a kind of brittle ache to the green in her brown eyes, like splinters embedded too far under the skin.

Castle had carefully kept himself between her and Black but even so she looked worse than she had in the car on the way here. He had really thought she'd steeled herself to it, that she'd been convinced it was important, whatever his father was up to. Maybe it was being in this cave with Black, being in close quarters.

Whatever it was, he pushed the back of his fingers to her hip and stroked softly, out of sight from his father. She lifted her head and gave him a tender look, but when she opened her mouth, she only talked about the images.

"Looks like an underground facility. These are infrared?" This question was directed at his father, which surprised Castle, but he didn't think he'd read her wrong. She was still not settled.

"Yes. Heat signatures under the ground."

"It's not heat from the ground itself?" she said calmly.

"Not that I can tell. Too much of it. At these concentrations? Come on."

Castle shot his father a quelling look but Black only raised an eyebrow. Problem was - that side of Black's face was twisted from where Castle had beat him pretty raw, and the reconstruction surgery on the ridge of bone over his eyebrow hadn't allowed for that kind of movement.

So the raised eyebrow only made the corner of Black's eye crinkle up, giving him a demented look that did nothing of what it once might have. Castle dropped his gaze back to the images so he wouldn't have to see it.

"So we have an underground facility about. . .one hundred miles from Mayak," Kate said quietly. "So what?"

"So. . ." his father drawled. "This is where the plutonium that needs reprocessing is _coming_ from."

Castle froze. "Coming from?"

"Yes."

Beckett was shaking her head and holding up a hand. "No. That's not what our intel said. Castle and I looked at all of it ourselves, and then Mitchell and Mason went over it with a fine-toothed comb - months before."

"Well you missed something."

"Not possible," she growled, something flaring bright and hot in her eyes. Castle rubbed his thumb over her hip and nudged her back a little.

"Okay, wait. The facility here at Mayak, the reprocessing plant that Vadim is in charge of-"

"Was," Black inserted nastily.

"Was," he allowed; the man was dead. "That plant was selling reprocessed product on the black market for use in producing nuclear weapons. I saw, with my own eyes, Vadim setting up a meeting to hand it off to his guy. In fact, Mitchell texted me last night to say they'd snagged Vadim's guy."

"But ask yourselves why Vadim's able to even do that, Richard. The government keeps very close track of every ounce of irradiated nuclear fuel that goes into that plant. If Vadim was siphoning it off to sell, they'd know."

At his side, Beckett leaned into the table and grabbed another image. "You mean to tell us that Vadim was getting _extra_ used plutonium from _this place_? This underground facility?"

"Yes," Black said definitely.

Castle eyed him and crossed his arms, then let his eyes scan the room, trying to figure out what his father was really doing here. When had the Director assigned Black to this task? How long had Black been here, holed up in this cave, recovering irregularly, crafting whatever plan this was?

"And we've heard _nothing?_" Beckett said with a snap in her voice. "Impossible. Mitchell has had men in here for months, and they never found a trace of extra plutonium."

"But I've been on top of it."

"Oh, really?" she snorted. "You neglected to inform anyone on our team about what you've been doing. Mitchell's had point on this and did you ever tell him?"

Castle moved away from them, letting his eyes trace over the computer equipment, the files, the corkboard. It looked _crazy_, but there was something to it that made Castle pause.

The underground facility just outside Mayak. Maybe his father had something here.

Black was still his calm, cool self. "I've got it all detailed. Every exchange with Vadim, every hand-off, every ounce. Photos, the money trail, the men involved."

Castle headed for the table filled with files and began flipping them open, searching for what, he didn't know, but needing to know what his father had been doing here. There was only so much-

Kate was suddenly there and snatching his hand back. He shot a startled look to her.

"Castle," she said quietly and shook her head.

"What?"

"Don't."

He glanced back down and he was only halfway through the stacks of folders, but now he realized they were labelled by date. For. . .months now. Wow. His father had been holed up here a long time.

Her voice was low, and only for him, when it came. "Castle, love, please."

He frowned, eyes snapping up to hers at the strain in her tone. "What are you-"

His father interrupted. "Richard. Perhaps you should take a look at the laptop. I've got it all lined up there."

"I like looking at the raw material," he said back. "You know that. You trained me to do it this way."

Wait.

Hold on.

He jerked his eyes back to Kate and her face was curiously, frighteningly blank.

"Kate?"

A wave of horror crashed over him, but surely it wasn't - this couldn't be - what _was_ this? Why did they look like they shared a fucking secret?

"Kate, did you know he was here?" he asked tightly.

Her face twisted into disbelief, a flash grenade of revulsion, and that was enough to calm him down.

"No, Castle. Of _course_ not."

"No, I know," he sighed out. "I know. You'd have told me. I know you'd have told me. I'm sorry. Just - you look - I'm sorry. Ignore me. I'm paranoid around him."

He shot a quick glance to his father just to make sure he knew where that snake was, and then he felt Kate's fingers wrapped around his wrist.

"No, Castle. It's. . .something else."

His stomach dropped out at just the tone of her voice.

* * *

The look on his face made her sick.

"Hey," she murmured, putting her body between his and the table, her hands coming to chest. "Castle. It's something I just found out. And I didn't want you to have to know."

His gaze slid from hers to the table filled with surveillance photos, all so precisely labeled, and she saw the moment it clicked for him.

"While you were in place with Vadim," he rasped. He jerked back around and went for his father, a fist coming up in a mindless way that made Kate's heart kick hard.

She ran after him, snagged him by the arm, jerking him to a stop only a yard away from Black who stood by the laptop looking supremely unconcerned.

But she could see now how that was an act. A mask he dropped in place to maintain his control of a situation, of Castle. If he looked to have it well in hand, then people bowed to his superior nature.

With his face drooping on one side and the tic in his jaw that he didn't seem to be aware of, Agent Black only looked grim. Not confident, not his usual nonchalant, not even the cold and impersonal man who'd pushed her to her knees in an alleyway and tried to 'do away' with the one impediment to his master plan for Richard Castle.

It looked very personal now.

"Castle," she said quietly, her fingers digging into his bicep to keep him there. "Mitchell said I'd have back-up. I just didn't know it'd be him."

"Mitchell didn't know who it was either," Black said, his voice smooth. He projected it well, as he always did, and it battled against the sorry picture he made physically.

"He better not have," Castle growled. She could feel his muscle bunch under her hand.

She shot Black a quick look; he kept his gaze steady on Castle but she saw the flare of annoyance that had always shadowed his eyes when she was around. Black loathed the idea that _Beckett_ was the one who could influence Castle, that she was the one Castle listened to and took advice from.

"The Director asked me personally," Black informed them. His tone was trying for sober but failing. Glee, superiority, personal vengeance were all in the silky rasp of his voice.

It was clear to Kate that Black still believed she had ruined his perfect machine, compromised the training and the regimen with needy love, that she'd absolutely destroyed the legacy Black had labored all of his life to create: the ideal agent, Richard Castle.

She still couldn't say that wasn't true. Kate would use verbs with a nicer connotation, but in the end, the result was the same. Castle wasn't the man he'd been. He wanted more out of his life than a successful mission or saving the world.

"You couldn't tell the Director that you had other plans?" Castle said. "You were supposed to retire, you bastard. Fuck. Every time I turn around, there you are in the middle of things. I can't get _rid _of you."

She let her hand drop from his arm; it looked like Castle had cooled down a little. He was shaking his head and rubbing at his eyes, grumbling under his breath. She glanced over to Black, and she was surprised to find his eyes on _her._ Calculating.

Her skin crawled.

Why was she keeping this man's secrets? Agreeing to not show Castle those surveillance photos only meant she had fucking aligned herself with his father. That could never be right.

Kate bit her bottom lip and glanced over at the table.

"Why do you keep looking over there? Both of you," Castle said suddenly.

She jerked her gaze back to his and opened her mouth to explain, but she couldn't seem to get the words out.

Being on Black's side. . .he had always just wanted Castled to do the job. It was about the service, right? And it couldn't do Castle any good to see that. What she'd done in service for the CIA. He had to know, intellectually, what her position at Vadim's side had to have meant, and at least she'd been able to tell him truthfully that he'd never raped her, she'd never even had sex with him, but-

Castle growled and pushed past her, walked crookedly back to the table before she could catch him.

"Richard-"

"Castle," she gasped, coming up on him the second his hand came to the date she feared the most.

And then he was opening the file.

* * *

"Fuck," he gasped, feeling his knees drop out as he stared down at the photo.

The world tunneled, harsh stabs of black as his vision closed in on Kate. Kate in this surveillance photo. And Vadim.

And Vadim's hands.

And now her hands were at his back and gripping his forearm as he leaned on the table on his fists, breathing hard.

"He never got there. He never touched me," she was murmuring.

"Never _touched_ you?" he growled. "I'm gonna fucking cut off his hands."

"Castle. You killed him," she sighed.

"If I'd known this, I'd have beat the shit out of him."

He couldn't take his eyes off the photo - Vadim sitting at a table in that strip joint Castle remembered first meeting him in, probably at that same table, and the lecherous, burning, cruel look on his face as he grabbed Kate Beckett by the ass and hauled her so close his nose was at her crotch, his hands disappearing under her skirt and touching fuck knew what else-

"Fuck," he moaned, had to close his eyes. "Fuck, Kate. What-"

She stroked his neck and rubbed the thumb of her other hand at the crook of his elbow but all he saw behind his eyelids was Vadim with a fucking face full of her crotch. "I swear he never - Castle, sweetheart, he never - it was only a week."

"A week," he choked, the rage tightening his throat so much he might collapse. "What the _fuck else _happened?"

"It's all there," a voice drifted from behind him.

The photos. Surveillance photos. All there. Castle's eyes snapped open and he snatched the folder up and flipped through them, that sick slimy nausea churning hard now, and image after image of Kate, of Kate, his _wife_, and then-

He went still, the photo trembling in his hand, and his eyes burned.

"Kate," he whispered.

His father cleared his throat in the sudden, painful silence. "I must admit - I have to give her credit for doing whatever it takes."

The picture of her here - the viciousness on Vadim's face and the blur of his foot, the movement arrested only by the shutter closing as he - as he-

"Kate," he garbled out, turning now to her and crunching the photo in his fist as he wrapped both arms around her. Tight.

Her ribs? Stomach?

"Baby," he moaned, cupping her face in his hands because the marks were there too, the fading bruises and the fresh ones, and _God_, it wasn't okay.

"I'm okay," she was whispering. And she looked it - she looked strong, fierce - but it wasn't okay; it wasn't okay.

Touching her was one thing, touching - but this, this was worse. This was damage, was her _not in control_ of this, Kate on her knees and the brutality of having to just fucking _take it_ while they all just watched the abuse.

He dropped his hands and spun towards his father, the rage singing in his blood. He advanced with every sharp breath, wanting to smash, to _crush_, to knock Black down and stomp on his mangled, malformed face until it crunched and his shoes were slick with gristle.

"Castle," she gasped.

Black stood his ground.

Castle grabbed him by the shirt and shook the man. "What the _fuck_ were you going to do? Sit and fucking _watch _her get beat, just fucking watch her in over her head in there and just - _fuck_ - you did _nothing_, you did absolutely nothing to help her-"

"She did her job. If you have to fuck someone to get the job done, that's what you do-"

"You bastard," he snarled and he went for the man.

* * *

"Castle! Castle - no!" She jerked forward and grabbed his arm, deflecting the punch just enough for it to clip his father's shoulder instead of his jaw. "Castle, honey, Castle-"

It was like he didn't even hear her.

"Castle, listen to me. I had it under control. I was _never_ in over my head." She wormed her way in between them, even though all of her NYPD training told her not to - and all of her still-wounded psyche wanted her to let Black have it.

She heard the grunting gurgle of air and she glanced over her shoulder to Black.

Castle, his arms reaching past her, was choking his father.

She gasped and grabbed his arm, tried shoving him back, her elbows digging into his chest as she put her whole weight into him. "Castle. The photos aren't all - that's not the whole story. Come on, let go of him. Let go-"

She managed to break his hold with the nerve-pinching grip of her fingers and he barked out a betraying yelp of pain. She kept pushing, got him off his father and back down the tunnel, out of that cave, away from Black.

He let himself be pushed, feet scuffling backwards until they hit the wall of the tunnel and jostled, and then his knees went out from under him and she was falling down over him, in his lap.

He was breathing hard, but she wrapped her arms around his neck and held him close. "I'm fine. I'm okay. Black took the worst of them, Castle, the ones that look bad. You didn't get to see what happened next."

"What happened next?" he cried out, his hands shaking as they gripped the back of her neck, tangled in her hair. "Kate-"

"I kicked him in the balls," she said quickly.

He choked on a laugh, the grief in his voice breaking her heart, and she cradled him against her, tighter and firmer, her cheek pressed to his as she curled in his lap.

"And then I tipped his chair back with my foot and he spilled out on the floor, drunk as shit, and everyone laughed and clapped and one of the strippers came off the stage and gave him a lap dance." She paused and took a breath. "On his face. Saved me from having to go after him."

"Shit," he moaned out, but there was more desperate amusement there than before.

She pressed a soft kiss to his cheek. "It's going to look bad in there, Castle. Those photos are going to look really bad."

His hand clutched around her. "Kate."

"It's okay; you know I'm okay, love. But looking at just one doesn't tell you everything that happened. Remember that there's always a story behind it, okay? Wait for the story."

He kept her close, not kissing her but just holding her, and she knew he was trying to gather back together all the pieces of himself that had broken apart in there.

"Rick," she murmured, coasting her lips along his eyelid. "Sweetheart. It's not as bad as it looks."

"He kicked you. And. And more."

"Yes. But I know how to take a kick, love. You've trained with me; you've seen it - mixed martial arts can be brutal. You know that."

"But he - he _liked_ it, he was-" He choked off the word, but it was there between them anyway.

Vadim had been aroused by it.

So what? Did that change anything? No.

"Castle," she said finally, sitting up and catching his face between her hands. "Look at me. You and I just had some pretty intense sex, and did it look like I was hurt - did it feel like it?"

He grunted and shook his head, shaking off her hands. "No. No, I - you're right."

"You gotta stop this. Or else you're going to prove that your father is right and I shouldn't be here."

"_No_."

"Then get yourself together." She pushed off against his chest and got to her feet, held her hand out to him. "Stand up. Trust that I can do my job. Get back in there, and let's finish this."

He took her hand and rose, strong, determination on his face but something. . .else. Something hard that made her breath catch.

"Castle?"

"He stood and watched. _I _stood and watched."

"Castle," she sighed. "He did his job so that I could do mine. _You_ did your job. We finished the mission."

"He would've let you-"

"Do not go there," she warned.

But he was already pushing past her and heading back for the cave, for his father, and she knew it wasn't over.

This thing between him and Black - it was deeper than even she could reach.

* * *

When Castle stepped back into the cave, he saw his father at the table of surveillance photos, his fingers stroking the image. Even from here, Castle could see it was his wife. His _wife_.

"You've kept the worst ones, haven't you?" he said, the moment he had his voice back. "You're keeping them for _kicks_, you asshole."

His father turned with a look Castle didn't want to interpret so he strode towards the table and pushed Black away, gathering the files up.

"These aren't for you. No one sees these."

"Richard-"

"No one else gets these. You upload these on the laptop?" he asked, nodding towards the other table. When his father only looked at him, Castle turned and went for it, calling up the operations command menu.

"Richard, that's evidence."

"Fuck the evidence. You've got the satellite images and you said yourself it's not Vadim doing the real work here. It's that underground facility. So this? You don't need this."

"Castle," she was saying softly.

He turned around and pointed at her. "No. No one else." And he wasn't sure what he meant - that no one else got to see these pictures or that no one else got to touch her.

She closed her mouth and he turned back to the computer, searched through the files for that week's dates. He trashed everything that had her face in it, every last one of them, reckless in his slash and burn effort, not caring at all.

"Richard, no," his father said, coming up at his side and grabbing his hand on the mouse.

He turned glittering, dangerous eyes to his father. "Get the fuck off me."

"You can't delete everything. Some of this you're going to need. For yourself. For the kill."

The kill. Vadim. Self-defense.

"Castle, he's right," Kate said quietly. "There'll be a review when we get back to New York. We need to keep enough of them that they establish his pattern of behavior - prove he came after us, that you didn't come after him."

"He fucking. . ." Castle cut himself off and pressed his lips flats, nostrils flaring. "Fine."

But there were going to be a damn sight less of them, and he wasn't at all letting Black keep them.

"You," he growled at his father. "Get none of these. I'll keep them, and you won't look at them, you don't touch them, you don't fucking _remember_ them in your perverted, twisted mind."

"You were once my son," Black said suddenly. "And then this?" Black turned his face to show Castle the ruined side. "And now this too. What the hell has she done to you?"

He jerked away from the computer. "You don't get to talk to me about her. You don't get to even mention her name. You did this. You. Not me. You hear me? You fucked me over one too many times, and then you went after _her_, like that was going to magically make everything back to how you wanted it-"

"She's no different from Sophia, from any of the other whores you've fucked."

He clenched his fists in an effort to keep control of himself - he'd promised Kate - but he couldn't help stepping forward, getting in his face, his voice roaring. "It's completely different. That's what's wrong with you, you asshole, that's what you don't seem to get. You fucked Turner? What do I care. The others? They were never Kate. Kate is more. Kate is everything."

"Kate's a _woman._"

And then the woman herself got between them. She held her hands up, her eyes on Black first even as Castle felt his chest heaving and tasted the blood in his mouth from actually, literally, biting his tongue.

Kate looked back and forth between him and Black. "Stop it, both of you. We have a job to do. Black, you have to stop baiting him, you stupid idiot, and you - Castle - you need to get control of yourself and stop proving him right about us."

He stumbled backwards, sucking in a hard breath. "What. No."

"Every time you fucking lose it, Castle, it just reinforces exactly what he thinks to be true - that when it comes to me, you can't handle it. So shut up and sit down. Keep the photos we need, delete the rest. I don't care."

He stared at her, but she was already turning back to Black.

"And you. You are supposed to be his _father_ and instead you've treated him like an experiment, like a thing - not even a _man_, let alone a son. So don't. Don't even try to explain, or try your mind games. Because I know what you are and it doesn't work on me. And if it doesn't work on me, then I'll make damn sure it doesn't work on him."

And then she turned away from them both.

Castle closed his mouth, realized he was fighting a smile.

That was his _wife._

Hot damn.


	7. Chapter 7

**Close Encounters 8: From Russia With Love**

* * *

It took Beckett entirely too long to get her focus; she kept hearing Castle growling and grumbling behind her and Black making snide comments about which photos to keep. She ignored them as best she could and laid out the projections and the data Black had collected, going over it and over it.

She couldn't fault the data. It was all there.

The irradiated plutonium coming into the plant, according to the government's statistics, was far less than what the plant had to be processing each day. The number of workers, the amount of hours, the processing speed - the math bore out the hypothesis.

Vadim had been given extra plutonium to reprocess, therefore giving him enough more to turn around and sell.

"The money," she murmured, eyeing the banking records that Black had been looking at. Vadim hadn't been doing it alone; there had to be a money trail leading back to whoever this was in the underground facility.

"Get the fuck off me," she heard.

Kate turned and saw Castle at the far table, gathering file folders and running roughshod over his father's attempts to stop him. He was ruining the neat organization, but they were all labeled; it wasn't like Black didn't have the time to redo it. She didn't feel sorry for him - let him sit in his freaky cave and put it all back together.

"Castle," she called out. He lifted burning eyes to her and she sighed. "This is gonna be weeks of therapy, isn't it?"

The fierceness and the rage broke in his eyes, filtered out into something more controllable even as he gruffed a laugh. It wasn't much, wasn't really all that convincing, but she'd take it.

"Yeah," he rasped. "More I see, more I want to blow shit up."

"Blowing shit up? We can do that. But I need your help," she said quietly. "We're going to have to close down that facility, but we've got to have all the information first."

Castle had file folders clutched in a death grip, but he lowered his head and seemed to make the effort. She saw him shoot his father a dark look, but then he came towards her and thumped the folders on the table next to her, still gripping them hard.

She shot the stack an uneasy look and lifted her eyes to his. At least some of that terrible grief was gone she saw. At least there was that.

"Castle, honey, what exactly you gonna do? Carry those around with us every we go?"

"No," he got out. "I'm fucking burning them. Give me five minutes and then I'm all yours. Yeah?"

She bit her lip but nodded at him. He needed to do this, needed to destroy it. Vadim was dead and he couldn't touch his father - this was all he had left.

Castle held out his hand to her. "Come with me. You're not staying here alone with him."

Kate glanced to Black but she slipped her arm through Castle's and followed back down the tunnel towards the car.

* * *

She watched him rummage in the trunk of the company car, crossed her arms over her chest at the cold air of the cave. She didn't know what he was planning on doing, some kind of ceremony or just trashing the whole thing without a second glance, but she wished he'd get on with it.

He popped back up with a satisfied grimace on his face, a kind of. . .weapon held in one hand, the files tucked under his other arm. The gun was rifle-length with a pump or tank attached to the stock. Instead of a normal muzzle, the weapon's barrel was caged like-

"A _flame-thrower_," she gasped. "Castle, are you out of your mind?"

"I'll be careful. I'll do it in here so no one out there picks up on the heat signature."

She gaped at him. "That is _not_ what I mean. It's a flame-thrower."

"I know how to aim."

"Our bathroom says otherwise." She rolled her eyes and came carefully towards him. "Look, I know you're. . ."

When he narrowed his eyes at her, she let that thought go and tried again.

"A flame-thrower inside a cave isn't a good idea, sweetheart. Pockets of gas, the close quarters-"

"Pockets of gas? It's not a mine. And we're surrounded by rock - that's not flammable. All that will go up are these damn photos."

Kate made the effort to relax, release her fists, take a breath. "I'm sure they have a cigarette lighter in that bag - the way those guys smoked? Yeah, just let me find one for you, okay? Castle, let me get a lighter."

She moved for the trunk of the car without waiting for an answer, but at least she didn't hear him starting up that damn flame-thrower. A _flame-thrower_, really? He'd lost it; he really wasn't thinking clearly, and it was all her fa-

No. It was _not_ her fault. It was his father's fault for orchestrating this whole damn thing, and it was the nature of the job, and it was. . .a host of other things. And while she had some responsibility, there was also Castle himself.

He felt guilty over what he'd done to his father in that alley, and he was angry because he felt guilty, and he was sublimating all of it into this wounded rage over the things Vadim had done to her - the things his father had seen her doing back.

It sucked. It really did, and she bet they had another few weeks of daily therapy - she hadn't been kidding - but it was survivable. It was surmountable, if only she could keep him with it.

"Thank God," she sighed, tugging the red lighter out of the outside pocket. "Here. Look. Castle. Here you go."

He scraped it out of her hand, tossed the flame-thrower back into the trunk. She swallowed hard and followed him to a broken stalagmite that jutted from the floor like a crystal in a broken and busted Fortress of Solitude.

Castle stood there for a moment and she waited, not sure what came next, not sure she should interrupt whatever was going on in his head. He flicked the lighter suddenly and it flamed up, bright and yellow, that center of blue flame, his thumb on the wheel and he stared at it a long, long time.

Kate reached for the file folders under his arm and carefully took them from him. She didn't know if he'd truly kept the photos out that he might need in the review, but they'd burn all of these, every single one from this week, regardless.

She opened the top folder and winced, tried not to think about what Castle must see when he looked at this, the twisted and deprecating look on her face, the cruelty in Vadim's ugly mouth, the bruises already marring her skin.

Damn.

"Don't look," he rasped and his large hand came to cover the photos. She dragged her gazed up to him and his mouth was curled down, struggling against some heavy emotion. "Let me just burn them."

She nodded and offered the file folders, but he shook his head and took up the top photograph, held it up to the lighter, his eyes staring deep into the flame.

Or maybe he was memorizing the photo. She hoped not.

He touched the fire to the picture and it smoked, curled, shriveled in the dance of flame. When it had shrunk to almost nothing, just the barest piece left between his thumb and forefinger and the fire greedily licking towards his skin, almost too late Castle released it to the jagged top of the broken stalagmite, letting it burn to a mere blackened worm.

He reached over and heavily took the next photo.

And then he lit it as well.

She closed her eyes and tried to keep back the frustration.

He was going to do them one by one.

* * *

Castle gazed at the blackened pile of scraps, the wizened remains of every last photograph of what had happened to her in Mayak, and he wished it were that simple, that easy.

It seemed to be for her.

He swallowed down the acrid taste of burning plastic and chemicals, and then he turned away from the pyre.

"Flame-thrower would've felt better," he muttered.

She caught his arm as he moved past and he couldn't not touch her back after that, couldn't let her think it mattered between them - what the job required. Because it didn't. It wasn't that.

It was having to do it at all, having put her there and having to endure Vadim, and then his father just-

Yeah, he couldn't do that. He couldn't go back there. Had to go forward.

Her fingers laced with his, but she kept cautiously away from him, giving him the moment, the space, but he hated space, hated distance between them and he tugged on her hand and pulled her into him.

He didn't even have to say it; she wrapped her arm around his neck, their joined hands coming up to his chest and her mouth opened against his and breathed, softly and with an urgency he couldn't deny.

So he kissed her, he took it, even though he knew that it would all come breaking through those neat, easy compartments in his head. It would.

He just hoped it wouldn't be soon.

* * *

She could tell by his face that they didn't have near enough information as Black liked, but Castle seemed to want to simply get it done. Castle wanted to bomb the place into oblivion; Kate, unfortunately, sided with Black. She just couldn't do that - not knowing what was down there - she needed more information.

Beckett sifted through the material again, something prodding at her, something that didn't quite make sense, but she couldn't get at it. Vadim's group were selling reprocessed nuclear materials and this underground facility. . .she couldn't make the pieces fit. The puzzle didn't add up.

"We need more information," she said finally, looking up from the files. She nudged Castle with her foot and he glanced at her and then back to the computer.

"Beckett."

"We can't bomb the place when we just don't know."

"Beckett, this isn't that kind of-"

"Castle," she said harshly, saw Black watching them. She pressed her lips together and ran her hand down her face. "Can we talk?"

Castle jerked upright and stared at her, then he glanced over his shoulder and she saw the understanding swim across his face. "Yeah. Yeah, sorry. I-"

She reached across the table and squeezed his hand. "Don't be sorry. Walk with me."

She stood and he came with her, pushed her towards the tunnel and back towards their vehicles in the anteroom. Beckett breathed in the humid, cool air of the cave and felt Castle at her side, a warm and restless energy coming off of him. She knew he wanted to just be done with it, but she couldn't do her job like this.

"Rick," she said quietly.

"I know," he gruffed. "I understand."

"We're the closest team on the ground; I'll give you that. But Mitchell's black ops guys will be here in eight hours. We go in, do some recon, take stock so that they know what they're dealing with."

"That sounds sensible, Kate, but this is a time-sensitive case here. We need immediate action."

"Eight hours. That's what I'm asking for. We can't bomb the place not knowing the consequences to all those _people_, Castle. If they've got active nuclear materials down there it could contaminate the whole region."

"You know how many nuclear accidents have been swept under the rug in Mayak?"

"At least one of near-Chernobyl proportions - I read the brief," she said softly. "That's why we can't do this to them. It can't be us. Just because their own government did it first doesn't make it okay."

"I know," he said roughly, shaking his head and leaning back against the rock wall. She stayed close, within the range of his body heat, and lifted her fingers to his chest, stroked the cotton of his shirt. "Kate, this job just - they ask for too much. They ask for more than we should have to give."

"Castle, that's the reason I'm out here. To do things differently. To make sure that we don't have to give too much."

"But Kate. . .what you did working Vadim - that's what I'm talking about here, now. I know we've been trying to demolish the old way, but it's clear to me now. Sometimes you do what you have to do. There's a time and place for being _righteous_ but the real world requires compromise."

She felt the burn start in her chest and flare in her tear ducts, the tightening in her face as she turned her head and closed her eyes. _Compromise._ Was that how he saw her now? Compromised.

"No, Castle. No." She clenched her fists. "Some things - we can't do. We can't compromise."

"I don't understand," he said again, a rough murmur of his voice. "Why is it okay for you, but not okay for me?"

She scrubbed a hand under her eye and sucked in a breath. But she didn't have words for it, the certainty she felt that they just couldn't. Vadim had been different. Vadim had been just herself, battered for a greater cause. This was _nuclear._

His arm came around her shoulders and drew her in closer, his mouth at her temple, breathing. She knew his silence was because he didn't have the answers either. In the past year, running CIA missions in Eastern Europe without his father's influence, they'd truly started to change things, to make things different. Ask questions first; shoot later - that had been their unofficial motto.

It had worked. It did work. It could still work.

She took another breath and steadied herself. "I don't want to blow it up not knowing. We said - we said we'd gather intelligence primarily, refer it up the chain of command. With Vadim, that was all I was doing."

"By letting him-"

"Castle," she said firmly. "I never broke our vows."

He went still and stiff against her, the clutch of his fingers in her hair and then that slow release. "I believe you. I know you. I know."

"I wasn't compromised."

He growled and his arm was like a steel band at her shoulders. "Did I say that? That's not what I think. I just don't want this life for us anymore. I don't want it. And if that means I take the risk of contaminating Mayak, Russia, with nuclear fallout, fuck it. I just want us out of here."

She sighed and cupped the back of his head with her palm, nudged his cheek with her lips in a brushing kiss. "Okay. Okay. But I can't do that. Eight hours, sweetheart. Give me eight hours and then we get out of here."

He dipped his head to her shoulder and breathed out. "Eight hours, Beckett."

* * *

"As soon as you two make a recon report, I'll have to call the Russians," Black said grimly. At least the man had been on his best behavior since she and Castle had gotten back to the main cave. No more of those sneering, self-important comments, although Kate had felt his eyes on her as they'd gone over the information.

"That's a bad idea," Castle grunted. "You can't do that. You let the Russians know we're stomping around in their yard and you're gonna have world war three on your hands."

"Not if I'm the one who calls."

Castle snorted but Kate pressed her thigh against his at the table, waited for Black to explain.

"I know the head of the FSB. I'll explain that we've discovered some terrorist arms dealing going on. I'll keep you out of the details, the whole operation, of course. But they have to know - we send in Mitchell's ground team to eliminate these guys and they're going to have to know. But before that, we have you two secure whatever sensitive material is there, keep it out of the Russians' hands as well."

Beckett hated to be agreeing at all with Black. But he was right. For the sake of international peace, they had to let the Russians know what was going on. "The Russians will figure out we've been there anyway. It's better to tell them."

"I'll drag my feet on it," Black said finally. "But it has to be done."

"The Russians aren't gonna be happy," Castle muttered. "They'll want to take over the clean-up and securing the plutonium. It's gonna get messy."

"It's what has to to be done," she said. He shot her a baleful look.

Kate glared at him and Castle glared back, but he finally relented with a slump of his shoulders, acting very much like a child. "Fine. Call the Russians. But only after we've uploaded images to the server, identified our targets."

"And the ground team," Kate added. "Gotta give them a chance to get in place."

"Seven hours now," Black said, glancing at the computer. "I'll call when they've reported in to me."

Castle grunted. "Shit. I really wanted to blow something up."

Beckett let the smile flicker across her face and turned back to his father. "We need supplies," she said quietly. Asking and not asking Black for those things.

Castle took over, leaning his elbows against the table. "Black, you got winter gear here? We're in sweats - don't even have coats. We need some heavy duty stuff. And binoculars, a food kit, water, you know the drill."

"I have those things," Black said slowly and then his face shifted, cracked like a cliffside was breaking off and falling into the sea. "Like old times, son."

Oh, shit. That was a _smile_ on Black's face. Kate wrapped her arms around her waist but Castle wasn't smiling back. In fact, his eyes had gone that blank, slate grey.

His father was dead to him, truly.

She swallowed and cleared her throat. "Where's your all-weather gear? We need to get going."

It took Black a beat to gather himself, but then he was turning stiffly towards a stack of containers along the wall and pulling out army fatigue pants, lined jackets. "I don't have anything to fit her."

Beckett reached out while Black's back was to them, and she touched Castle's shoulder. He gave her a bleak look.

"I'll figure something out. Even a man's coat is fine."

He nodded and glanced back to his father. "What about phones? Beckett's was pulverized at the motel and we didn't have a chance to get a new one."

Black lifted, holding out a coat and a fleece all-weather jacket. "No extra phone. Don't even have extra weapons. I'm not prepared to outfit a team here. This is what I've got."

Castle growled but snatched the coat, tossed it over to Beckett. She caught it and bit her lip. "We've got the weapons from Vadim. And Castle - you've got your phone still. That's all we need. It's not like we're splitting up."

His hands were clenched around the edge of the jacket.

She sighed. "Castle. In and out. We do some recon and then the team cleans it up and we get _out_ of here."

He nodded tightly and drew his arm around her waist, pulled her roughly against him, his mouth to her temple.

"Then I want to take you somewhere we can be alone," he whispered. "Just us."

She shivered and pressed her cheek to his. "Me too."

But they had a job to do first.

* * *

"I don't think this is our best option," he said clearly.

"It's what we've got," she insisted.

Castle sank back down on his haunches and handed her the binoculars, flexed his fingers for the water. They switched and she inched upwards over the cragged face of the rock formation, her elbows digging in as she positioned herself, and Castle took a quick swig of water.

It was freezing out here; not even the thermal wear could keep that harsh wind off his face.

"Best option is to get the fuck out of here and let Black clean up his own shit," Castle grumbled, leaning his head back against the outcropping of rock and staring up at the stars.

"Castle," she muttered, clearly more than through with his whining. "We've had this conversation."

Well, tough shit. He felt like whining. He didn't want to be doing recon work just so another team could go in and play nice with the Russian government. He wanted to crush something, wanted to collapse the ceiling in on their heads like stomping on an anthill.

He wanted to grind to dust Vadim's whole enterprise, and it was just galling enough that the man was already dead and couldn't see it. "You promised to let me blow shit up."

"I did," she said testily. "But I was hoping for the super spy and not the child."

"I'm not a child."

"You're acting like-" She cut off her own sentence with a growl and wriggled back down next to him, slapped the binoculars against his chest. "Stop it. Right now. I'm not having this in the middle of an op."

He shut his mouth. She was right, but he was pissed. Over everything. His rage had been siphoned off, but the beast it fed was still there, a yowling, hungry thing in his chest. He wanted someone to _break_ for this.

"You agreed to this," she said quietly.

He had. And this was their lives; he knew that. So he flipped over onto his belly with the binoculars held close to his chest and crawled back up to the top, looked again.

The entrance to the underground facility was hauntingly similar to Black's - a tumble of rocks from the far flung hills, a scraggle of stunted trees and underbrush after a long and frozen field of steppe. Nothing untoward, nothing to be seen.

Except now a black jalopy was speeding over an invisible dirt track, lights off.

"Beckett," he murmured. She was instantly at his side on the rock formation, her shoulder pressed to his, peering through the darkness.

He handed over the binoculars. "Two o'clock, approaching from the north."

She hummed something like satisfaction as she studied their new arrival, and he felt that telltale flush of arousal and excitement heat him up again. Suddenly the thermal gear, the coat were too much and he yanked his thin gloves off and stuck them into the pocket of his cargo pants.

She gave him the binoculars back and as their fingers touched, sparks jumped between them, real enough to almost see the blue crackling energy.

He grinned back at her and she leaned in and pressed a hard kiss to his mouth.

"Show time, super spy."


	8. Chapter 8

**Close Encounters 8**

* * *

At a closer distance, Beckett used the wireless camera to document the meeting and upload the images back to Black - and to the CIA station in Rome where Mitchell and Mason were coordinating the whole thing. When the guy in the jalopy stopped to pull on his radiation suit, she'd gotten a positive ID as one of Vadim's couriers, but the guys who came out of the underground facility were already garbed, faces behind the hood of the suit.

Castle was at her back, fiddling with the infrared goggles, but he turned around at her low tone, came beside her in the scrub brush.

"Elevator," she said quietly.

He peered through the goggles and he must have seen what the camera had barely caught - the flash of the metal elevator car just past the trees.

Castle grunted and suddenly used his hand to duck her head back down, pressing them both to the earth. "They might have infrared scopes out there too," he murmured. "Sentry swinging this way."

"Shit," she breathed out, her cheek scratching against dirt and loose rocks. "You saw the lift?"

"Yeah. Fancy. Transporting the stuff straight down in the elevator."

"Shielded too."

"Good point," he murmured at her ear. "Only way in?"

"Looks like."

He muttered something and she got to a cautious elbow, propped the camera up once more to record again.

"Should've blown this shit up," he growled.

"Can't blow up nuclear material, you ass."

"But I wanted-"

"If you're good, I'll let you go on the strike team," she cut him off.

He huffed. "You'll _let_ me."

"Uh-huh. When they go in to neutralize the place, you'll get to go with them."

He grumbled again, but she elbowed him to be quiet, watched the hand-off on the little screen. It was tinted to minimize glare, so while she'd switched it to infrared and the quality was excellent, she still couldn't see much - green and red blurs.

"What're they doing?" she muttered, squinting at the image as she tried to make it coalesce into something recognizable.

Castle was propped up next to her again. "Sentry's turned north, back towards the road."

"Hm."

"Jalopy guy is standing by his vehicle. They're wheeling something over to the elevator."

Beckett now could make out the suited figures on camera and the massive metal cart between them. "Is that pick-up or delivery, could you tell?"

He sighed. "Nope. We had to duck the moment they made the exchange. Could be either. Jalopy guy's got this huge metal case, holding it like it contains precious cargo. So I bet he picked something up."

"Black's files seemed to indicate the transactions were done in gold. Could be that?"

"Could be," he muttered back. "But he could've picked up the plutonium to be reprocessed-"

He cut off suddenly, cursing, and she tensed, hunched her body closer to the earth. "What? Castle, what?"

"They didn't make an exchange of money for plutonium - they made a straight exchange. Plutonium for plutonium."

"What? How can you-"

"Think about it. They go to all this risk, all this trouble, just to help Vadim get rich? No. They need the reprocessing plant to do it for them, and then they _use it themselves_. Vadim wasn't selling straight reprocessed plutonium. He was selling the fucking finished product."

"Wait. Wait, Vadim was selling _nukes_?"

"Nuclear weapons, yeah. Makes sense, doesn't it? Why he came after us too, I think. Not about just losing you."

"Sure know how to make a girl feel special, Castle."

"I mean - yeah, he was pissed over losing you to me, but he's more pissed that we might've seen something. Remember how delighted he was when I went along? He _wanted_ me there. Wanted to kill me in his factory, on his turf."

"You'd been made?" she said, her chest tight.

"Or he just felt like fucking over a low-level lackey. Get his kicks. Shit. He was selling these damn nuclear weapons and who knows where they are - all over Mayak in his thousand little hidey holes."

"I know of three," she said quickly. "He took me to at least three."

"I know of one - the auto repair-"

"Yeah," she confirmed, cursing and pressing a hand over her eyes. "Shit. We need confirmation of this. I never saw nukes, but I wasn't looking for them."

"Me either. But I bet Jalopy Guy down there has finished product to sell. Look at how he's carrying that thing."

"So Jalopy Guy just handed over the reprocessed stuff and picked up nuclear weapons. He wasn't in a suit though - the whole drive here, and he's not wearing a suit?"

"In that metal case, padded and shielded, bet it's pretty safe, and he definitely wouldn't want to attract attention on the road. But when making the exchange, handling weapons grade plutonium? That guy wants to be on the safe side."

And sure enough, as they watched, Jalopy Guy was anchoring the case in the open back of the frame vehicle. He started to strip the suit off once more.

"That's why a jalopy," Castle breathed out. "Fuck, they're custom made to fit around the case. Look at that."

The case fit snugly into the back, the vehicle like one of those dune buggies from Mad Max, post-apocalyptic and everything. Jalopy Guy swung into the driver's seat using the roller bar and started the engine.

Beckett groaned softly and scraped her hand down her face. "We've got to go in there, take whatever plutonium they've got, tag the finished products for the ground team to recover - and then we've got to find out where Vadim's other hiding places are."

"No," he said gruffly. "We don't. Not our job. We're not going down in there. The two of us?"

"But if we take down that place without knowing where they've distributed the weapons, they're gone, Castle. We'll never get them back."

"Hunting down nuclear weapons will be someone else's job. I'll assign it to Mitchell and Mason and _they_ can risk their asses-"

She reached over and squeezed his forearm. "I know doing it like this was my idea. But this changes things. We have to go in there. We have to find out where those weapons are being taken."

He cursed again and she could hear his shallow breathing beside her, but she could barely see him, outfitted as they both were to blend in. The night was deepest darkness around them and she wanted to take his hand, squeeze it, but surely he knew what was right. He had to already know.

He growled. "Fuck. We're going in."

* * *

"I don't like this," he muttered, but the elevator itself was clear when the doors opened. The shiny metal of the interior car was radiation shielding, he supposed. They had a plan - get inside the elevator and go down. Heh. Sounded simple - but it was certainly going to get fucked up soon enough.

When he'd pressed the call button hidden in the side of the rock, he'd expected death to come rising up to meet them. Not an empty, shiny lift. Like it was just waiting for them.

"No cameras inside," she said quietly, angling the surveillance lens on its long snake-like cord. "Not that I can detect anyway."

"All right," he said, but his hands were sweating. He couldn't remember the last time his hands had sweat this much on a mission.

Beckett was winding the snake-eye back up, stuffing it down into her pants pocket. She checked her gun and reholstered it. "You ready?"

But his phone vibrated once in his pocket and he pulled it out to check. "Mitchell says they've got satellite tasked to follow the jalopy."

"Good," she breathed out. "Now get in."

She was already sliding through the last few feet of scrub brush and slipping inside; his heart rate jacked up but he followed after her, tasting metal in his mouth as he entered the elevator.

"This isn't a good idea," he muttered, but she was already clutching his shoulders and lifting her foot.

"Boost me up."

He dutifully made a foothold for her boot and she stepped onto his laced fingers, shifted her weight as she put her other knee on his shoulder. He grunted and swayed as she made him off-balanced, but he gripped her by the thigh as she struggled to stand upright on his shoulders.

He bounced off the side of the elevator car and cursed, and the doors closed.

"Shit. Faster, Beckett."

"I'm trying," she hissed back. "Oof, Castle. Your _hands_."

"One last time to cop a feel before we die. Come on."

Her feet were _sharp_ on his shoulders and they kept tilting back and forth as she worked at the overhead ceiling tile, smashing the butt of a flashlight into one corner. He gripped her legs harder, tried to widen his stance so she had some stability, but the lift was sinking down.

"Oh," she breathed out. "Got it."

And then the weight was being lifted off his shoulders and her foot smacked him in the side of the head and he ducked too late, but she was up the rabbit hole.

He tilted his head back to look at her; she was peering back through the vent, horrified. "Castle," she gasped. "I can't - I can't pull you up."

"I know," he said grimly, and reached behind him for the automatic slung at his back. He'd known that when they made the plan in the first place. But she was right; they had to get inside and figure out where those nuclear weapons were going.

"_No_."

"Sorry, sweetheart."

He turned to face the doors, gun at the ready.

* * *

"Don't be a martyr," she hissed down. "Climb the damn wall, you asshole. Right now."

Stoic bastard that he was, Castle just stood there, gun aimed for the door. He wouldn't get far; they knew that. They'd _talked_ about that when they went over the plan. They had to hide on top of the elevator and get off at an access hatch, use the maintenance corridors.

It was supposed to be simple.

"Castle, don't you fucking do this to me-"

"Nothing to be done."

"Yes, there is. There is a _way out_. Listen to me and do as I say."

He cast her a baleful look, as if _shushing_ her, and oh holy hell, she was going to beat his ass the moment they were safe.

"Richard. Castle. You are supposed to be the father of my children, but so help me I will fucking castrate you if you don't put your damn foot on the railing and swing out and jump for the cross bar."

"What?" he growled.

She slammed the heel of her hand against the metal that had propped up two of the panels of the elevator's ceiling. She'd slid them both aside and the crossbar was firm. "Put your foot on the rail, the metal hand rail. Launch yourself up. It will work. But it might take a couple jumps, so fucking _get going_."

She saw the moment it clicked with him and then he was swinging the automatic back over his shoulder and torquing his body to plant a foot on the railing. Castle was a lot more acrobatic than he believed himself to be - the things they did in bed, hello - and when he got his foot up against the railing, he was already launching his long body through the air.

He got it on the first try, and Beckett sank back on her heels on top of the elevator car and put a hand over her eyes, tried not to laugh out of sheer relief.

And then she realized he was still hanging there and she jerked back into action, reaching out to help catch his feet as he swung himself up and then contorted his way topside. When he was panting and red-faced and sprawled all over her, but _here_, she wrapped her arms around him and groaned.

She wasn't crying. Fuck. No, she wasn't.

* * *

He slid the heavy ceiling panels back into place, and he pushed her towards the slowly passing shaft walls. "Grab one."

She bit her bottom lip and narrowed her eyes at the rungs; he watched her concentrate, timing it, and then she gave a little bounce on her toes and was gone.

He huffed a laugh and saw her dangling just above him on the service ladder, the elevator moving even farther away, and so Castle shook his head, got the rhythm of it, and jumped.

He caught the rung with both hands, clutched tightly to keep his body from swinging to one side, and then he had his feet under him. He glanced up and Kate winked at him.

"All right. You see an access panel anywhere?"

"Honestly, there might only be one level to this place."

"Doubt it," he said, looking back down the shaft as the elevator descended.

"No floor buttons, did you see that?"

"I bet the elevator goes automatically to a ground floor - a receiving floor, and you have to get another elevator or use a key to go any farther down," he said back. "Maybe even just stairs."

She gave him a look like, _no way of knowing_, which was true enough, but he'd been doing this for so long now, he'd discovered these facilities never changed that much.

"Just keep looking," he said quickly, and then he started climbing down. When he lifted his head, he saw Kate climbing up - smart girl - and he kept going, brushing his hand over the wall to make sure he wasn't missing something in the darkness.

Suddenly the elevator stopped, the creaking of the lines grumbled and ceased, and he held his breath.

The doors opened.

Bullets tore through the elevator car, the sound ricocheting through the shaft and deafening him. Castle clung closer to the ladder and tilted his head back to look at Kate; about seven feet above him now, she was staring down, her face white in the darkness.

He gave a shaky smile and she shook her head, but he saw her take a moment and press her forehead against the back of her hand. He could hear guys in the lift now, investigating the empty car, and he moved carefully down, inspecting the walls for an access panel.

A voice hissed in the darkness over his head. "Castle."

He glanced up once more and she was gesturing for him to come up, so he started climbing, watching her reach for something set into the wall. He heard the groan of metal against metal and they both winced, pausing to make sure no one had heard that.

After a breathless second, he started climbing again and Beckett worked at whatever she'd found. He saw the darker shadow of a door being pushed in and then Beckett was leaning out too far-

"Shit," he grunted, but instead of falling, she'd disappeared into the bowels of the facility.

Castle hurried to follow.

* * *

Beckett laughed softly when Castle smacked her ass, coming up behind her in the access tunnel, and she kicked back a little with her foot, nudging him away. He retaliated by bumping his shoulder into her hip but that was - ouch - that wasn't good, and it flared to life and let her know it wasn't happy about all the movement.

She must have faltered, because Castle was gripping her ankle and making her stop, his body sliding up under hers in the narrow tunnel, and she grunted amusement at seeing him under her.

"Sorry," he said quietly, reaching up to brush her hair behind her ear. "I'm sorry. I forgot."

She nodded and he curled his fingers at the back of her neck and pulled. She let her arms collapse and her body rest over his for a moment.

"Rest," he said softly. "Give me a minute to see if I can get Mitchell and check our status, and you rest, love."

"On top of you in the middle of an access tunnel?"

"Just that. Told you I'd take you to some interesting places."

She chuckled and pressed her face into his shirt to keep the sound muffled, but she did as he requested - commanded? - and she let herself take a moment. Her hip pulsed with fresh agony, but the longer she stayed there, her injured hip propped up against him, the more it subsided into that sleeping, bone-deep ache.

She felt his movement at her side as he checked the satellite phone for mission briefs, and she waited, content to let him have the reins for the moment. Snatching a cuddle in an access hatch of an underground enemy base wasn't exactly what she'd pictured for them, but it worked.

She liked it.

Actually, she liked _him_ and somehow she'd coupled sneaking around and crawling through tunnels and European tours with _him_ and now it was all this package deal that she couldn't say no to. If he weren't this, if his mother had stood up to Black, and he was something else, would she be as stupidly in love with that too?

Chemistry teacher or baggage handler or actor? Would she have absorbed that part of him into her so completely that the thrill of being on the stage or the inner workings of an airport security system would drive her to such lengths?

She couldn't imagine him any other man, but the _spy_ wasn't the one she loved. It was just him, the Castle who crawled up under her in an access shaft and said he was sorry with that kicked-puppy look in his eyes, the Castle who married her in Rome on a mission and then shyly told her he wanted it to be real, the Castle who wrote all his stories in her notebook and then couldn't stand to see her face when she read them.

Kate reached out and caressed his jaw, pressed her lips to the skin just at his neck, overwhelmed with having him.

"Time to go," she gruffed out. Before she couldn't.

"Yeah, okay. Mitchell says they've got the jalopy; it's turned off the M5 and they're closing in."

And then Castle was moving her off of him and taking the lead down the tunnel.

* * *

"Are we _lost_?" she grumbled.

"Hush your mouth," he shot back, moving doggedly forward.

"Rick Castle, you got us _lost._"

"I did not."

"I swear. Super spy or not-"

"I hate you," he muttered, throwing her a look over his shoulder. "If we just keep going north, it has to lead back to the main corridor."

"What main corridor? The elevator shaft?"

"Yes. And then from there, we can work the left hand tunnel that we didn't take."

"Baby, we're not moving north."

"Yes we are," he said, laughing a little. "It's on the phone."

"Castle, a lot of this is shielded for radiation."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." She gave him a raised eyebrow and then it hit him. Iron. Shit.

"Damn it." He growled and sank back on his haunches, hunched up in these damn tunnels. It'd only been twenty minutes, but that was about eighteen minutes too long, and they needed to do this now. "Wait. How'd you know we're not going north?"

She shrugged. "We need to head - uh, that way." She nodded towards the middle of the tunnel, a little ways to their right, and he groaned.

"My wife is a homing pigeon."

"Shut up."

"I can legitimately call you bird."

"Not if you want to keep all your limbs."

He couldn't help the grin that skirted across his face and he glanced back the way they'd come. "Okay, well, sweetheart, up to you. Forward or retreat?"

She was on her knees beside him and she swiveled her head back and forth. "Forward. Take the first right turn we can."

He nodded. "And if there are no right turns?"

"We've got all night, lover."

They didn't, not really, and that's exactly what she meant. "I really hate you."

"I know."

* * *

"Well, fuck, you're good," he muttered.

Beckett shot him a look to make him shut up and sank down on her stomach to watch through the vent. He'd followed her lead this time and now they'd come out over a lab of some kind - had to be for the plutonium - because just head of them the tunnel had been blocked by shielding.

If they didn't get out through the vent here, they'd have to turn around and go back.

"How many?" he murmured at her ear, his body laid out practically on top of hers.

"Five."

"I count four," he whispered, then his breath hitched as number five strolled below them, casual and easy. "Shit. Five. Let's take a second."

She nodded and they settled down into surveillance mode, quiet and careful, noting the lab workers' routines and patterns as they moved. This seemed to be a kind of staging area, assembling computer parts and logic boards rather than doing hands on work with the plutonium itself.

Kate lifted her head slightly and studied the shielding in the access tunnel ahead of them. Past that would be where all the real weapon-making was going on, but she didn't know how safe it would be.

Shit, she actually did want kids with him some day and she had no idea how much radiation dosing they could survive without damaging things. But would it even be possible to go farther? Did they even need to?

"No security in these tunnels," she remarked softly. No cameras, no alarms, nothing. "Seems odd, Castle."

"Bet there's plenty past that," he said quietly, nodding to the shielding ahead of them. "Plus, they feel safe. Out in the middle of nowhere, the elevator is the only way down. . ."

"Fire hazard," she muttered.

He chuckled quietly near her ear and moved his hand slowly up her back, a seductive move that made her heart race. "Sometimes you are such a cop," he whispered.

She was seriously going to hurt him for that.

"Okay, what do you say we take the room?" he murmured then. His hand was still stroking, fingers up her shirt and jacket now to bare skin, and she wasn't sure what he was playing at other than just feeling her up before a mission-

Oh. Oh, was _that_ it? Castle getting his rocks off. Horny man.

She huffed and turned to him, reaching out to hook her fingers in the waistband of his fatigues, dragging him closer. "You got a plan, hotshot?"

"I always have a plan."

* * *

As far as plans went, it was half-assed and destined to run into snags.

But it was the best they had.

So they went for it.

When one of the lab workers left the room, saying something about a fifteen minute break in Ukranian, he figured there was no time like the present - only four remained plus one security guard at the door. Beckett, double fisting her weapons even though she wasn't trained to shoot with her left, pressed against the far side of the access shaft, while Castle aimed through the vent and opened fire.

In the resulting chaos, Beckett and Castle stomped their feet against the vent and kicked it off, sliding out and dispatching the last remaining resistance.

The jump to the floor jarred his bones and made his thigh twinge, but he didn't have time to check on Beckett, see how she'd fared that fall. He barked out orders in Ukranian; the workers in the room had their hands up and were mostly cowering. He saw one man with a stubborn set to his jaw and Castle made a point of paying him close attention.

They'd aimed high - since they were already about ten feet off the floor, it was easy to do - and these were lab technicians, not enemies of the state. The security guard who'd been on duty inside was bleeding on the floor, but definitely dead, and Castle scooped up the radio and shoved it in his pocket.

Beckett was herding the workers towards the back; she'd grabbed a woman's thin sweater and came to him now, pulled his knife from its sheath on his thigh. She cut strips of the sweater and made one of the women tie everyone's hands behind their back. Wouldn't last long, but it would do for now.

Castle nodded to the man with the tense jaw and Beckett cut her eyes to him. She used Ukranian, hers a little more stilted but passable, to order the man to one side. His fear was a flash across his face, but it hardened him instead of making him wary, and Beckett raised her fist and smashed the butt of one gun against his skull. He dropped like a stone and the women still being tied up all gasped.

"We won't hurt you. We're anti-terrorism agents and you've been involved in illegal arms processing." His Ukranian was smooth and perfect and he rounded the room. "We need information. Who can tell us where all the computers are kept?"

They were left with just the three women, and there was a long and nervous pause.

"Ahh, so you knew what you were doing. Fine then. You'll be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. However. Right now, it's just the two of us. Advance team. But we've got to go after the nuclear weapons you guys have been shipping out of here and that means - when we leave - well, what can we do to stop you from leaving as well?"

The woman on the end shifted even farther from her two compatriots and then she licked her lips.

Castle tried to keep the self-satisfied grin off his face and he glanced instead to Beckett. She smirked at him and took the one on the end by the arm and dragged her towards the dead guard.

"Or we could leave you like this," Kate said fiercely. "Which is it?"

And the woman broke.


	9. Chapter 9

**Close Encounters 8**

* * *

Beckett felt like she needed to apologize. But she wouldn't. They'd shut the door on the lab and were heading down the corridor at a good clip, hoping to avoid the guards that patrolled, but behind them - behind them. . .

The women were still alive, the man unconscious on the floor and tied to the emergency chemical shower. It would take them some time to get free, but it left a variable in their equation that could shift into a threat at any moment.

And she knew Castle hated that. She did too. But she wasn't going to conscience killing people when it wasn't necessary. They could deal with it as it came. The woman had given them a rough map of the facility and told them where to find the computers - as far as where specifically Vadim had ferreted the weapons he was selling, she hadn't known.

But in the meantime, she'd told them about the plutonium housed next door. And one look at Castle had told Beckett that they'd have to go and get it, pick it up before anything else.

Beckett still felt like she needed to apologize.

The hall was cinderblock and linoleum done in a muted grey, the doors were slate with easy-to-pick locks on the knobs. Security seemed minimal, until they passed the well-fortified, reinforced door with a matte black pad to one side for a keycard. The room next door.

"Must be where they keep the plutonium," he said, nodding. "According to that woman - this should be all of it."

"Think she told us the truth?"

He glanced down the hall. "Yeah. Look at this place. It was made hastily, equal parts top of the line and modern, and also cheap and shoddy. Security is lacking because they're betting on it being impossible to get past the welcome wagon."

She nodded. "But it feels wrong."

He sighed but he was digging the key card out of his pocket. "It feels wrong," he admitted. They'd stolen the card from the unconscious guy on the floor - and he'd be one to raise the alarm.

"Wait," she said. She didn't know why. It was just _wrong_ in here. Too laidback for a place dealing with nuclear arms. All the proper checks were in place - the shielding, the suits, the emergency contingencies all lined up - but it just didn't sit right with her.

"Wait?"

She took a breath and reached for the walkie in his pocket, turning up the volume. The security guard's radio was quiet but for idle chatter. Check-ins from the guys at the lobby where the elevator opened up, a joke passed around.

It really felt wrong. Something off. "The access tunnels off the elevator shaft," she said slowly. "A lot of. . .empty space. A lot of tunnel for what, ultimately, is two floors of working lab and storage rooms."

"They mean to expand," he said quietly. "They've always meant to go bigger than this."

That was scary too. But there was something niggling at her. "Where did these guys get the plutonium _originally_?"

Castle narrowed his eyes. "What do you mean?"

"When they started this place. Where did _that_ plutonium come from? Vadim skimming plutonium off the top wasn't noticed at the reprocessing plant because they had extra coming in - from here. But where did these guys get it to begin with?"

Castle stared at her, mouth open but nothing coming out.

"There had to be an origin for this, Castle. This is bigger than just some local mafia guys laundering money - you have to make the plutonium in the first place that then gets reprocessed. Where did they get it?"

"Shit."

She pressed a hand to her forehead, but from down the hall they heard the unmistakable feedback of a radio, and the heavy footfall of a security guard.

He took a breath and gave her an apologetic look. "We don't have time. We just have to - do this. Ready to go?"

No. But.

"Ready," she sighed.

He swiped the key card over the panel and the light turned green. So Beckett put her hand out and turned the knob.

* * *

He shouldered past her into the door, Kate coming behind him at a crouch while he cleared the room.

No one was inside.

Pristine white walls, a bank of what looked like freezers set into the far side of the room, a sterile chamber to the right.

Kate shoved on him and he went forward, let her close the door after them. He breathed heavily through his nose, scanned the radiation suits that were hanging up on the left hand wall.

"Hey," he said quietly, nodding to them.

"Yeah," she said. "Might even be able to walk onto the elevator in them?"

He thought for a moment. "Maybe. Might be stopped. They know each other down here. Too small to not."

"I don't think they know the guards as well," Kate said softly, heading past him for the suits.

"Why do you say that?" He moved towards the sterile chamber - the thick glass walls and the airlock, the complicated looking control panel. He couldn't understand why no one was at work inside, why it was empty.

"When you shot the guard - they were horrified, they were stricken - but they weren't grieving. When I hit the guy on the head and knocked him unconscious those three women had more of an emotional reaction to him than to the guard, dead at their feet."

"Ah. Okay."

"So. I bet the guards are rotated in and out. High turnover. Keeps them from getting ideas about this place. Keeps the lab workers isolated so they have only each other. Fosters community on a very limited level."

"Shit, you're brilliant," he grunted. He glanced back at her and she was holding up a radiation suit for size. "Would it be weird if I said I'm incredibly turned on right now?"

"Radiation suits do it for ya, super spy?"

"Everything that comes out of your mouth does it for me."

"I know some things that have been in my-"

He growled and advanced towards her, but she laughed and pushed the suit into his shoulders, shoving him back.

"Try this on."

He took it from her, eyeing the get up. "We can't hide our guns."

"Make a slit in the side."

"Then it doesn't really do you any good. Or me, for that matter. Radiation gets through right at the family jewels, Beckett."

She was pressing her lips flat in amusement, but he saw the flickering awareness behind her eyes. She was thinking it too.

"If we get a kid with two heads, I'm blaming your 'slit' idea," he muttered, stepping into the legs of the radiation suit.

"Baby, if we get a kid with two heads, I'm outta here."

He laughed and caught her eye, but the tension between them now was new. Not sexual, but _worry_. And not for themselves.

He pulled up the pants of the suit and tied the arms around his waist, let it bunch there, ignoring the frisson of danger that both aroused and now scared the shit out of him. The guns, the security guards, the bombs - he could take that. Anything.

But the idea that the next choice he made might seriously fuck up his kid...

Even worse? He couldn't possibly send Beckett back up to the surface even to protect her; it wouldn't work. He couldn't not have her here. Not just because they were already severely outnumbered, not just because his father was somewhere up there coordinating things, not just because being separated always led to disaster for them, but because he _wanted_ her.

He wanted her.

Here. With him. Never anywhere else.

Even if it fucked up their future.

How damn selfish was that?

* * *

It was hot in the radiation suit, but she'd found utility belts hanging up in the metal storage closet and at least they could get to their weapons without compromising the suit's integrity. They hadn't seen guns on the four workers who'd gone above ground to make the exchange, but that wasn't something they could worry about right now.

Castle was attempting to breach the sterile chamber.

She licked her lips and rolled her head on her neck, one wepaon in her hand, the other tucked into the belt. Her heart was pounding, more nervous over this one part of their plan than anything else - even shooting their way to the elevator and leaving.

The woman in the lab had said there were probably a few more cases of unused plutonium in here, but all the weapons had been shipped out. The finished products were well on their way to whatever damn hole in the ground Vadim had carved out for his little business, or even farther afield, and it made her nauseous to think of all that nuclear material just floating around out there.

They'd take the plutonium that was left, and leave the weapons that might still be here to the ground team to neutralize. Then they'd upload the computer's information and send it all to the CIA to sort.

Still, she was sweating inside the plastic suit, and even though she had her back against the glass of the sterile chamber, ready to open fire on anyone who might come through the door, she didn't want to be doing this.

It all felt wrong.

She felt the click of the door as the airlock unsealed and then Castle was nudging her hip. She turned and saw through her visor that the sterile chamber was opening; her heart kicked up.

But she followed him inside, at his back with an eye on the closed door that led to the hallway - and potential danger. The door airlocked behind them and now Castle was at the control panel to get the interior door open, and the tight confines made her bounce on the balls of her feet, trying to maintain her composure.

It was fear, but it was adrenaline and arousal as well. She was tingling with it, the blood rushed in her hands and made every nerve ending so sensitive. She wished they weren't in these suits, that she could brush her lips over the rough scrape of his jaw where the scruff was coming in, feel his breath against her mouth.

Fuck, she had to stop thinking about it.

The interior door whined as it came open and he reached back to take her gloved hand, the rubber squeaking obscenely, her breath catching.

A radiation suit was _not_ erotic. It wasn't. _Come on, Beckett, focus._

A long range of metal and glass cabinets stood to one side, looking strangely like a wine fridge, with a table set up on the other side, various instruments and supplies scattered over its working top. A metal casing of a small arms missile was displayed on a rack that held it carefully in place, while the guts of the missile were in a neat order on a tray to one side.

It looked like a strange and interrupted surgery.

She cast her eyes back to the front door as Castle began opening one cabinet after another, searching for the hard cakes of plutonium.

"It's not that radioactive," he said to her suddenly, his voice muffled by the suit.

"What?" she said, whipping her head back to him.

"From my weapons training in the army - it's not that radioactive. If you inhale it - lung cancer, definitely deadly. But minimal shielding - that's what I remember. Plastic. It'll be in just plastic. . .ah, and here we are."

She jerked her head to the cabinet and watched him remove what looked like a tupperware container of something faintly grey green. They looked like urinal cakes stacked in plastic baggies, and something about the ridiculousness of that image made her want to laugh.

She choked it back and watched him count the cakes, his rubber gloves so brilliantly yellow against the queasy green of the plutonium.

"Kate, see if you can find a case," he said quietly. Reverently, she thought.

For the power in his hands.

She swallowed hard and opened up another cabinet, searching for something to transport the radioactive material inside. There had to be a way to get it to the reprocessing plant in the first place, a method they used and would have-

"Got it," she said. She pulled out cylindrical tubes of steel or maybe heavy aluminum, and read the inscription etched into the side in Russian.

_Caution: Radioactive Plutonium - 288. Less than 3 Curies 1993. Do Not Discard. Contact Nuclear Battery of the 9th Army Division, Mayak Industrial Complex, Russia. Date of Manufacture 1993. Serial No. .3B/ 93_

She held the steel tube and Castle popped open the top of it so he could fit the plutonium cakes down inside. Something about the inscription worked at her though, made her hesitate, and she bumped hands with him, her heart picking up.

"What is it?" he said quietly, still working slowly as he stacked the cakes inside the tube.

"I don't know." She closed the metal tube and he took it from her, now holding both the plastic container and the cylinder, and she turned back to the cabinet to look for a carrying case.

It was on the floor inside, and she grabbed it quickly, popped open the latches to see the foam padding inside, the perfect hollow spaces for those tubes. Ten total.

_Ten_ at a time.

Shit.

She laid it out on the table and he eased the tube into the center space. He turned back to the cabinet and put the container back empty, and then she watched him go through the last four cabinets, looking for anything they might have missed.

And then it hit her.

"It says to contact the Russian Army," she said aloud.

Castle turned back to her, his movements smooth and effortless as he closed the case and flipped down the latches. He lifted his head to her and studied her a moment. "Okay."

"Are they all marked like that?"

"Probably where they stole it from in the first place."

"And so they _kept_ them? The containers telling everyone it's the property of the Army. And the case. Look - here too."

She ran her fingers over the initials inscribed along the top, evidence of the perfidy. Castle frowned and lifted the case up off the table, steady in his hand. "Let's just get out of here. Leave the investigation until later."

"Yeah," she murmured, following him out of the sterile chamber. He had to hand the case off to her so he could mess with the control panel inside the air lock, get the interior door to seal. Once it was closed, she felt trapped. Ridiculously, completely closed off.

It wasn't erotic; it wasn't arousing (okay, it was, but fuck, it shouldn't be), and she just wanted out of here. Out.

The outer door opened and she pushed forward with the case in her hand, her weapon in the other, and Castle came after her, taking the plutonium. She had her fingers around the door knob before the sterile chamber could even close up again, and the moment she was in the hall, she let out a long breath.

Castle was unzipping the top half of the suit, pulling the hood down with one hand. She glanced at him in surprise but did the same, grateful for cooler air. He had the satellite phone out and was texting.

"What are you doing?"

"We're gonna need an extraction for this. We can't travel with it," he said quietly. The hallway was quiet, no sound from the radio as Castle messaged Mitchell. She scouted down a little ways, checking the cross hall, but the place was so empty.

It was giving her the creeps. Running around with plutonium and a handful of trussed up lab workers back there and the emptiness.

"Okay," he said softly. "They're sending a light chopper - the black ops kind - to come pick up this baby. You and I will have to go out on foot after we make the drop off."

"Of course," she murmured. The car was about a five mile hike back through the scrub brush and spotty trees, parked in a cave formed by a rock formation. "We ready?"

"Yeah. Let's go."

* * *

Beckett took the lead and Castle hung back with his hand tight on the case of plutonium. The hallway was dim with what looked like emergency lighting - but had to be just more of the same cheap production and hasty erection of this underground facility.

The radio chattered quietly from Beckett's utility belt on the radiation suit, but it was still innocuous, still no alarm. He'd be worried about it but the conversation was casual and correct, for all intents and purposes, and he liked to think he could tell when a ruse was being played out.

Beckett stopped at the junction of the next hall and ducked back, holding her arm out to stop him. He paused behind her and lifted an eyebrow and she held up a finger for him to wait. There was a puff of her breath and then she head checked, a dart forward and back, and she was nodding him on.

He stopped at the room that housed the facility's central hub - at least according to the woman in the lab. The door had the same matte black security pad and he flashed the stolen card quickly. Beckett took point as they entered fast, and she put down two guards before they knew what had happened. Castle shot a third man in the head, forestalling his reach for a bright red panic button.

"Shit," Beckett breathed out.

He glanced over and saw one of the guards was dying, the other moaning. "You didn't shoot to kill?" he said harshly. "I'm carrying fucking plutonium, Beckett."

She flashed him a guilty look, horror creeping over her face. "I - no. Castle."

He shook his head once and moved past her, the plutonium heavy, dragging at his arm. The gash in his leg was starting ache, an angry chatter in his nerves, but he pushed the awareness away and sat down at the main console, shoving the dead man off his chair.

"Castle," she said with a grunt.

"We don't have time," he said quietly. They couldn't afford this. Not now. "Help me, Kate."

She made a noise in her throat, but she was at his side in moments even as he put the plutonium at his feet and wiped the sweat of his palm on the radiation suit. He was getting overheated in all these layers, but he called up the computer's command language and focused.

She was at the console beside him, her fingers typing slowly, her brow knitted.

"Sorry," he said gruffly, dragging his eyes back to the screen. "What am I looking for here?"

"My guess - the carrier routes. I bet it's all GPS-tracked. No way they let these lackeys come and go without some way of finding them should anything happen." She was carefully not addressing his apology.

"Fair point," he said, unlike her, addressing both. "Carrier routes. The information would be logged in an automatic update, which means you'd see a lot of code, a lot of command language. You'd-"

"I'm not in the command language," she said quietly. "That's your area. I'd never find that looking at code. I'm just opening random hard drives - this is all partitioned."

He shut his mouth then, let her work at her own pace, with the skills she had. Huh, well, maybe she _had_ been addressing what had just happened - but once again, in her own way. That's what she'd been trying to tell him all along, right? She had to go at this her own way.

"I'm sorry," he said again, quieter.

She let out a little breath and then sucked it in again. "I've got it. Shit. I've got it, Castle. It's connected to a map too - holy shit, it's all right here."

He laughed a little and leaned over to look at her screen, noting the directory and hard drive location. He scanned the interface's read-outs and then he turned back to his own computer and accessed the subroutine.

"You get it?" she said.

He nodded. "I'll upload it to my phone - I've got the cord with me."

"And from there you can send it to Mitchell."

At that, he grimaced and pulled his phone out from his pants' pocket, checked the battery. "Shit."

"What?"

"It's dying. I can't be sure I'll get it all sent. Probably will kill the phone."

She winced back at him but shook her head. "Nothing for it, Castle. At least we'll have it. Upload it, and we'll just have to get to civilization so you can charge it."

"Damn," he sighed, plugging in the cord he'd yanked from the charger. The charger which was back at the car because he had _just_ charged it in Black's crazy cave. "The phone is probably messed up. Something happened to it."

"Probably when we were rolling around on the ground in that motel room," she snorted. "Hurry."

"I'm hurrying," he said, connecting the phone to the computer and writing the command codes as he did.

"I'll keep watch in the hallway. Don't forget the plutonium."

"Haha," he muttered, but now the GPS information was loading on his phone.

* * *

They walked single file down the hall, his feet soft and cautious, and Beckett wandered a little ahead of him to keep watch. His hands were steady now, his mind clear, and now that they had uploaded the locations of Vadim's hidey holes, all they had to do was get on that elevator.

He paused with her at the end of the hall, breathing quickly, and she rested there a moment with her back to the wall. "Two guards at the end," she whispered.

"We have to take them," he said quietly back. "_You_ have to take them. Shoot to kill, Beckett."

Her face pulled tight, pinched, but she set her mouth and nodded. Her free hand rose between them, gripped his shirt as she leaned in. Her kiss was hard, a little brutal, a lot unapologetic, and he let her bite his lip and suck on the wound, the blood metallic against his teeth.

"Okay," she said then and let go of him to pull out her other weapon from the belt. "I know."

She flipped around the corner before he could say another word; he heard the first shot like a choking cough - the guard had a suppressor? - and then the second a beat later like a car backfiring in an alley - too close, a little strange.

"Clear."

He whipped around the corner and she was already running towards the elevator, dragging the key from around the dead man's neck, yanking when it got tangled. He stepped on the man's chest to give her leverage and the chain broke as she pulled, came free in her hands.

Her eyes were hard but tortured; she'd been a homicide detective too long for Castle's casual disregard of the dead. He moved to nudge her towards the security panel, but she was already going, handing her gun back to him so he could play lookout.

The case of plutonium cakes was in his other hand, resting against his knee, and he felt the sweat pour down his back, tension returning. But she was quick and the elevator door opened up for them in a second.

He could hear guards rounding the corner and he stepped onto the lift even as an alarm went off, harsh and strident in his ears. Beckett had the key and was inside, crowding him to the back as she thumbed the button for the top. The doors closed all too slowly, but then they were on their way.

He still had her gun and she took it from him, double fisting it once more, standing regal and Amazonian, bathed in the red emergency light of the elevator. Her head was tilted back as if to watch the ascent, her fingers flexing around the guns, her body up on the balls of her feet and _ready_.

Fuck, she was hot.

Castle reached out and gripped her by the back of her neck. She stiffened but turned into him, and their mouths clashed in an instant, intense and needy. She kept the guns away from him, because she was just that fucking amazing, and he had only one hand to work with himself, but he angled her jaw and plunged deeply into her mouth, sucking the hard edge of her tongue and giving back her bite.

Her breathing was harsh and shallow, and her hips nudged his with intent, with promise.

"Soon as I get you alone," she rasped.

At least he wasn't the only one.

* * *

Castle was messaging the team up top even as the elevator creaked and came to a stop. She pressed the door button - there was no _hold_ or _door open_ but she was afraid that the guards at the bottom would call for the elevator and it would shut on them before they had a chance to get out.

The doors began to part and immediately halted.

"Fuck," she growled. "Castle, go, go, go." She held the button down hard, as if the force of her push could keep it there, and the doors stuttered and jerked as if being yanked by an unseen hand.

Castle was already sliding into the tight space, sucking in his chest to get through sideways, and she felt the blood pound in her body as he disappeared. A second later he was back, both hands free now, and shoving the doors apart with his chest and biceps straining.

"Kate," he growled out, getting a foot up to brace the door.

She holstered one weapon and crawled over his leg, touching his thigh for balance, his eyes flashing hot at her, and then she was out, standing in the freezing wind of the Russian steppe. Castle jumped out of the elevator and the doors slammed shut, the whine of the elevator going back down.

"It's only about thirty seconds," he said roughly, reaching past her to snatch the case off the ground. "So we have a minute's head start."

"Well, fuck," she grunted. "Run."

* * *

It was a straight sprint out from the elevator shaft buried in the rock formation, his feet hitting loose stone and debris, Beckett at his back and breathing hard through the cold air. His injured thigh ached and burned by the time they heard voices behind them, but he didn't have time to worry about it.

But he thought he felt blood.

Beckett's hand wrapped around his elbow, urging him on, and he realized he was falling off, his gait slower than hers, and he picked up the pace again. She squeezed hard, as if reassuring herself, and they trekked across open steppe to eat up the distance.

When gunfire sounded behind them, he lifted his knees and pushed himself farther, grinding it out until even Beckett was a whole step behind him now. He couldn't make her think she had to slow down for him; his leg would be fine. The wound had probably just opened up again.

The firefight sounded intense now, and Kate spoke up. "I think the ground team has engaged them."

At least there was that. "Can't stop though."

She was breathing hard, but she could still talk. "No. They'll have sent someone."

He nodded because he found he couldn't talk and breathe at the same time, his lungs constricting strangely. Radiation? No idea, no clue, he just had to push himself until they got to the extraction point. Get the case on the chopper and then he and Beckett could head for the car.

And get the fuck out of Russia. With love.

He grunted on a laugh and shook his head, wincing at the pound of his blood. A rock under his boot turned his foot, but he caught himself and ran on, licking his lips against the cold.

Suddenly the whistle of wind changed pitch, higher and more sinister, and he stopped dead on the spot, Beckett plowing into his back. She cursed but he kept hold of the case, turned on his feet to glance up at the night sky.

The whistle turned to a whine and now Beckett gripped his arm.

"A bomb?" she gasped.

"Whatever it is - it's close."

"It's coming _down_."

He fumbled at his pants pocket and jerked his phone out, thumbing it awake. The battery flashed at him - nearly out - and he cursed. Still, better than nothing. "Here," he growled, shoving it into her hands. "Take this."

"Castle-" The whine of the shell turned into a scream and they both lifted their heads.

"Fuck, run," he gasped out, shoving her to the south and avoiding the pinpoint of falling sky he now could see in the upper atmosphere.

"Surface to air missile?" she panted out, her fingers twined in his now and running at the same pace.

"Not quite," he said grimly, churning up the rock and brittle steppe, the shrub grass thicker now as they cleared the rock formation. "Mortar round."

He heard the whine so loudly now that the very air seemed to vibrate with it, the grass wavering, and then Kate gasped and he felt her twist away from him on a fall.

His momentum took him forward but he turned to go back for her and at that very moment, the mortar slammed into the earth.

His body was shoved violently to one side and his head smashed against rock and there was nothing.


	10. Chapter 10

**Close Encounters 8**

* * *

Beckett groaned and the terrible cacophony of soundlessness made her eyes scrape open. Darkness arced above her, inviolate, and she blinked furiously until she realized it was sky.

Outside. She was outside.

A missile. A bomb. Something. Shit, where was the damn plutonium? Oh, God. Oh, God, _Castle_.

She rolled onto her side and vomited as her head spun, felt tears push into her eyes, her hands planted in the scrub grass. She pushed up shakily to her knees, eyes fiercely closed, breathing through the last of the nausea.

Her head was split in half, the ache behind her eyes made her want to bash her forehead against a rock. Fuck. Not good. Close, that'd been close - too close.

Castle.

She lurched upright and swayed, lost her balance as her inner ear rang, fell back to one knee with a sharp jarring thud. She groaned and her stomach heaved once more; acid burned her throat as she threw up again.

Concussion. She had a concussion.

Castle. She had to get up. She opened her mouth to call his name but nothing seemed to work. Her knee spasmed as she put weight on it, but she dragged herself up again and flung her body towards the north, where Castle had been before-

God. Oh God. Oh-

The space between them was a crater.

* * *

When the buzzing in her head began to clear, she realized she'd been thrown at least five yards from the impact site. It was still burning in places, a steady blaze against the darkness, and she traversed the circumfrence in an unsteady gait, her balance off and her stomach churning.

She didn't know. She didn't know but-

Oh, thank you, God.

Castle.

She ran forward, tripping and stumbling over her own feet, the rush of blood pounding in her head and making her bite her lip to hold back the grunt of pain. She slipped on a rock and came down again, crawled the last few feet towards his prone, inert body.

"Castle," she gasped out, reaching for him. His face was a mess; blood leaked from under his head and she feathered her fingers over his skull, swallowing back the urge to cry. She touched his neck and slumped when she felt his pulse throb, steady but slow under his skin. "Castle, wake up."

She couldn't even hear her own voice, just the echo of it in her head, and the ringing went on and on so that she doubted he'd be able to hear her either. She framed his jaw with her fingers and drew an eyelid up, checked his pupils - not that there was light to react to, but in the darkness that pressed over them, at least neither eye looked blown.

Okay, okay.

Beckett leaned over him and felt his breath against her ear, the wheeze and rush of air, but it didn't sound right. She snaked her fingers under his neck slowly, parted through his hair until she found the swollen edge of the knot and then the open mess at his skull. She felt the fresh warmth of his blood but it was shallow. It was a shallow laceration. It was going to be okay.

She pressed her lips together and blinked hard, lifted up as she skimmed her hands down his body. His chest was broad, fit and warm, and his arms were okay, no broken bones. Bloodied scrapes at his elbows where maybe he'd tried to brace himself on the way down, and she moved to his waist, didn't try to untwist his legs from their strange position.

She came to a halt at his thigh, her heart rate jackrabbiting.

Blood. Thick and some of it sticky, like he'd been bleeding for a while now, and fresher blood over it. The gash in his thigh. He had stitched up her hip, but this whole time - had he needed stitches himself? Why the hell hadn't he told her it was still bleeding?

From far off, she heard the sounds of mortar shells, and she realized stupidly that those were the first sounds she'd heard outside of her own head in the last fifteen minutes. She reached for his pants, thinking she'd get a better look, but she didn't want to move anything in case his spine. . .

Blood pulsed suddenly under her fingers, in time to the thump of his heart, and she choked back the panic, pressed harder to the wound. Her blood-red hand slipped against his thigh, the rubber and plastic of the radiation suit making it slick even as she tried to stem the tide. She had to think. And fast. There wasn't much time. He needed medical attention and she-

The phone. He'd given her the satellite phone. Oh God, please.

She skimmed her hand inside her over-sized fleece and found the interior pocket, ripped it getting the phone out. She smeared the face with his blood turning it on, and then she hurriedly went to the message app, the thin red line of the low battery mocking her. She couldn't hold her fingers steady enough to type a message to Mitchell, and God, he needed help, she needed _help_.

So she ignored protocol and just fucking called his personal cell phone. "Beckett?" Mitchell answered. "Fuck, what are you doing?"

"The helicopter," she said, her words sounding numb and far away. "When - where does it land? Castle is unconscious, losing blood. I need-"

"Beckett, it's just to pick up the plutonium. You have the plutonium?"

"I don't know," she said hollowly, feeling the hot pulse of his blood under her other hand. "I don't - yes. There it is. I have it. I can't move him. The helicopter will have to come to me."

"Beckett-"

"There's a crater. It's lit with fire. Easy target."

"Beckett-"

"Have them land on the north side. I need to get Castle out of here. Now."

"Beckett it's not a transport chopper."

* * *

Beckett ripped the radiation suit off her body and use his knife to cut it into strips. Her head still buzzed and snarled with the aftereffects of that explosion, but she pushed through the dizziness and fashioned a tourniquet around his upper thigh with the knife's harness and the suit material.

Castle groaned once and she startled, her breath catching, her hand still pressed against his leg. She waited but there was no movement, not a flutter, and from far off, she heard the rapid fire sound of automatic weapons.

Shit. The mortar rounds, the ground team getting ambushed - something had gone wrong.

Beckett pulled out the phone again and found her hands were a little less shaky even if the letters still swam in front of her eyes. The battery was going; she had almost nothing left. But she risked texting Mitchell again.

_What's going on?_

While she waited on his response, she ran her fingers under Castle's neck again, probed the wound at the back of his head. With his legs twisted under him and the awkward position, she was afraid he'd done damage to his spine. She didn't dare move him, but he'd _have_ to be moved. She'd have to move him on that helicopter.

No other option.

She considered the wound once more and tried to devise a way of keeping his head immobile during transport.

Beckett had to think, _just think_, and ignore the fierce ache in her own body, ignore the trembling urge to curl up and cry; she was not giving in to the panic. She had to think.

There had to be a way to triage him.

A splint? Maybe. It was all shrub grass and a blackened crater, all cold and half-frozen earth and the stunted trees. A branch. Beckett got to her feet only to trip over the case of plutonium, fall to her hands and knees with a jarring to her head that made her moan.

And then she felt the shift in the wind, the disturbing sensation of movement all around her, and she lifted her head in the flame-licked darkness.

The helicopter.

Thank God.

She dragged herself back to Castle, obsessively checking the leg wound again, and then she drew the case in closer to his body and hunched over him as the chopper beat at the night air. It was a silence she knew didn't just come from the muffled ringing in her ears, but also from the covert nature of its design.

She pressed her hand over Castle's leg once more, but the blood seemed to be slowing. She wondered if the initial cut had been torn perilously close to that deep artery, if the mortar shell's concussion or shrapnel had ripped it open further. There was so much blood.

The plutonium had to get on that chopper, but so did Castle. So did her husband.

The light craft landed and she saw immediately what Mitchell had meant - not a transport. There was only a pilot, no weapons, and where the passengers would have sat was only a flat, open-air cargo area. Barely space at all.

She half-stood in the darkness, everything pale green with the sudden light that glowed from the underbelly of the chopper. The pilot climbed out and she saw with a growing sense of dread that she recognized the man's stiff and limping walk. She knew him.

Black.

But no. Wait. His _father_.

Her heart lifted, soared - his father would get him _out_ of here - and she dropped back to her knees beside Castle, dipped her head over him and kissed him hard.

It would have to last her.

Black came up on her then, still in the protective helmet and jumpsuit, his hands in gloves. But she knew it was him.

She lifted her head. "You have to take him. He won't survive."

Black crouched next to her, flipping back the visor of the helmet, and he stared at her; she'd never seen him at a loss for words.

"You hear me? You have to take him with you. He goes with the plutonium, or it doesn't go at all."

And then Black opened his mouth and she saw real terror at the back of his eyes. "It will overweight the chopper."

"You can do it. I _know_ you can."

"Agent Beckett... I can't take you with me."

"But you can take him," she pressed, everything tight in her chest. "You can save him."

His father looked down at the sprawled form of his son and she saw his jaw flex and clench beneath the strap of the helmet. "Help me get him onto the chopper."

She was never in her life so grateful to see his father.

* * *

To have come this far, to have done everything - the death and the mortar rounds and Vadim - and be undone by _him_? By Black.

She wouldn't - she couldn't. She had to fucking do this. She grunted at the movement of her head but she stayed crouched at Castle's shoulders, watched his father grab Castle's feet. She didn't want him _touching_ Castle, but this was the only way. The only way.

"You're going to need help," he said.

She didn't trust him; she couldn't. But with Castle's life. . .

Black would drop her dead in an alley every single time and not even flinch. But when Black had been faced with fighting back against his own son, defending himself and possibly severely injuring Castle in that alley - he hadn't done it. Black had taken the beating - a severe beating - so he wouldn't damage his son.

That was what she had to cling to, hope in. That his fanatical need for power and control extended to the flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood.

She had to trust in that, no matter the evil he'd done to her. Trust that he wanted his son alive and under his control.

Beckett hooked her arms under Castle's shoulders and she nodded at Black. "On three."

He set his face, a grimace of pain that flickered along Beckett's awareness like a touch. But he was already grabbing Castle by the legs and counting up.

"One," he wheezed. "Two."

"Three," she grunted and used her knees as she stood, sweat breaking fiercely down her face and into her eyes, her body swaying with the weight of Castle.

Black was studying her, intent and calculating even as the ground shook with another mortar shell farther afield. Beckett gritted her teeth to keep from stumbling, wondered if Black was scheming her death even now.

Probably.

Of course, wasn't that already fait accompli? Leaving her here - Black probably thought her an incompetent fool, not just because she'd been the one to insist on not bombing the facility in the first place.

But she'd hike back to the car, put as many miles as she could, head for the border. It wasn't hopeless; it really wasn't.

And Castle needed medical attention now - not in four hours when she could cross the border safely. Kazakhstan to the south wasn't exactly neutral territory either; there would still be danger and Castle's leg, his head - he needed a hospital.

She hefted him a little higher and tried to pick up the pace, her shuffling, stumbling steps backwards to the chopper making her feel seasick as if the ground was shaking. Another mortar round went off and she really did pitch to one side, catching herself at the last minute.

Her hip ached so badly that it set up a counter rhythm to the angry pain in her head; she squinted her eyes in the darkness to let in even less light, tried to focus.

Small steps. She had to ignore the way her lungs burned and her body threatened to collapse. Keep walking.

"Beckett," his father said harshly. "Faster. He's losing blood."

Her eyes snapped open and she sought out the line of his leg, saw the tourniquet had loosened as they'd moved him. She growled out her frustration and picked her feet up, tried to move, her body burning with agony.

"Beckett," he barked out. "Get moving."

She wanted to weep; everything was aflame. But she shuffled her feet faster, opened her eyes to see that Black was sweating hard, his body shaking, and she realized - she knew - he was having almost as much trouble as she was.

His twisted body, his contorted face, the hunch of his walk that she'd seen in that cave. Castle had beat him senseless that day in the alley, and now here it was coming back to bite them both.

There were always consequences for every act.

"Pick up your feet," he snarled at her, his eyes suddenly flashing in the darkness. She realized she'd stumbled to a stop and swallowed hard, a flash of fear as she started up again. They moved so slowly like this, crab-walking over the steppe. Surely they were at the chopper now? Surely the distance hadn't been this insurmountable?

Why couldn't she fucking make her damn feet _work_? The most important moment of her life and she was having trouble keeping focus. Not acceptable.

No. No. _Walk, Beckett._

Suddenly her back smacked the metal bird sharply and she cried out, fumbling with Castle, panic skittering in her blood as she nearly dropped him.

"Damn you, Beckett. You have to do this," Black was snarling. "Don't fucking quit on me now. Just like a damn woman-"

She flashed white-hot with a double agony - her body and her heart - and she groaned out as she hefted Castle higher, aiming for the cargo space.

"You'll have to crawl in and drag him across," Black said briskly, his voice clipped and strained.

She fucking hated him. She wanted him _dead_, so dead, and yet she was depending on him for Castle's very life.

She propped an elbow at the open space of the cargo hold, leaned back to contort her upper body into it. She scrabbled with her feet and found purchase on something, shoved hard so that her whole body screamed, and then Castle's heavy form was half inside the chopper.

Thank God.

She panted on the cold metal for half a second, her body completely out of her control, and she heard the whine in the back of her throat like shame.

She had to drag him across now. She had to. They had to do this _fast_, now. Now, Beckett.

She rolled onto her side, one arm still hooked under Castle's shoulder, and she pulled.

She cried out as her muscles flared and ripped, something deep breaking open, splitting at the seams. She sobbed out and leaned over him, felt the ineffectual shove by Black as he tried to force Castle's frame inside the chopper, and she pulled again.

Everything was pain. The world was fire.

She bit her tongue to keep from crying and hooked her leg over the far entrance of the cargo hold, used her thigh muscles to drag both her own body and Castle's across the space.

"Don't stop, don't stop," Black was chanting.

She felt the moment Castle slid into place, felt it in the sudden drop out the other side, her ass hitting the ground and rattling her brain, and gasped as her arm wrenched painfully, still caught under Castle's body.

She was contorted half against the chopper, but she forced herself to her feet and crawled up inside once more. She reached for the tourniquet and tightened it, gripping the harness and twisting the material again. Black was fumbling at something and suddenly he tossed her the end of a bungee cord, the sharp hook flying towards her face.

She ducked and instinctively reached up to catch it, her heart slamming against her ribs in a bitter panic as she stared at Black's eyes.

He hated her. God, he wanted nothing more than for her to die out here.

And she just might.

Shit.

Her hands shook as she hooked the cord, and then she licked her lips and nodded back towards the edge of the crater.

"Get the plutonium. Might want to check the case and be sure it hasn't cracked. The cylinder's inside. I'll make him secure."

Black's mouth tightened but he evidently didn't want her touching the case either, because he twisted around and headed back for it. She let out a whistling breath, the adrenaline dumping hard through the blood again, and her mind raced for something to do, to figure this out.

If she only knew how to fly this stupid chopper.

Fuck.

Castle would've. Black expected her to die out here and she was just beginning to realize that might be possible. But if not - if she made it, and she could, fuck, she could; she was strong, and there was Castle.

But there was nothing to keep Black from telling him all kinds of lies. Nothing at all. Perfect opportunity, really, for him to get rid of her entirely. Simple. Tell Castle she had died in the explosion. Send a couple of agents after her in Kazakhstan. No one could say differently.

But, no. Wait. She'd called Mitchell. He'd know she'd been alive immediately afterwards but would he believe she'd survived? She'd sounded bad; she knew that she'd sounded - shocky. A death knell, slipping into shock like that - Black would be believed. No one would say differently, not against Black.

Beckett glanced through the cargo space, her hands fumbling at the bungee cords, wrapping it under Castle's arm. She reached out and cradled his neck for an instant, the pale, slack face and the mouth that could smile crookedly at her but not often enough. He never smiled enough. He should have been someone so much lighter than this dark man she loved.

She had to combat his father's inevitable betrayal, the lies that would no doubt be told about this night.

Black was already checking the case; she could see from her perch in the cargo space, tight and cramped. Castle's knees were up against his chest, and his body half-turned away from her to fit.

Without even being aware of what she was doing, she slipped her fingers inside the pocket of her ill-fitting thin coat, fished out Castle's satellite phone. As she'd noticed before, the battery was red, nearly gone.

She closed out of the messaging app and called up the notepad, her thumbs hovering over the keypad when it appeared. The battery was dying; it wouldn't last. It would do her no good to have it, but all the information had been uploaded to this phone and Castle would look at it sooner rather than later. She could get him a message.

What to say.

How to say it.

She started typing, her eyes burning with it, her breath rattling in her chest. She didn't know if her hands shook because of what she had to do, or if it was the concussion and the singing fire in her nerves as pain licked her clean.

She typed her message and she stared at it for a too-long moment before she finally entered one last line:

_No matter what happens, I love you._

* * *

Beckett's hands shook once again as she hooked the bungee cord at the far side of the chopper's cargo net. The plutonium was in the cockpit and the chopper's blades were still moving, nearly soundless but for the displacement of air.

And the phone was secured down Castle's boot, just as he'd always done. When he went in for surgery, she knew they'd find it, take it. But eventually, he'd get it back. He'd get it back and he'd know.

Because before the mortar shell had hit, Castle had given the phone to _her._ And if he had it back, that meant she was alive after the explosion had gone off. He'd know she'd put it on him for a reason.

Black came at her side and tugged on the cord, nodded to her. She stepped back and felt the ground sway, tried to reach out and catch herself on the open metal doorway.

Black caught her, held her steady for an instant, and she shot him a look, her stomach roiling.

"Beckett," he raised his voice over the sound of the rushing air. "It's the Russian Army."

"What?" she said back, pressing her fingers into her thigh so that the pain would focus her. "What's the army? Back there?"

"The underground facility. It was the Russians. Not a terrorist group; we didn't know. I should've known. But you can't go back - they're advancing this way. The team - the ground team-"

She was going to throw up.

"They've been slaughtered. Don't go back there."

She blinked and the world pitched crazily but she stood her ground through sheer force of will alone. "You need to go," she said finally. "You need to take him."

Black was already hiking his leg into the cockpit and climbing inside. She stepped back and let her eyes linger of Castle's body, the hunched form of him crammed into the tight space.

The blades beat faster at the air and she moved back once more, ducked instinctively even though it wasn't close, and her body pitched towards the rocky earth. She managed to stabilize herself, and then the runners were lifting off the ground and she raised her eyes to Castle once more, prayed with every thread of her being.

The chopper rolled a little and her heart clenched, but Black leveled it out and the bird continued to rise, beating at the air like a frantic thing. She clenched her hands into fists and her body thrummed with the effort of the chopper and then they were five feet above her, ten, twenty, and pushing off south towards the Kazakhstan border.

She watched it go, her heart thundering, her force of will alone keeping it in the air as it pitched and yawed in the blackness, fighting a barrel roll and a deadly spiral with every struggling second.

They had to make it. God, they had to make it.

Slowly the world returned her as the helicopter began to grow fainter.

The sound of the battle being waged to the north, towards Mayak, the deep boom of the Russian Army's mortar fire and shelling, and finally the cold and desperate wind that blew across the steppe. She had to get going.

But the Russian Army was between her and their car, and it was just over a hundred miles to the Kazakhstan border.

For the first time since regaining consciousness, she wasn't sure she could take another step.

* * *

The End of **Close Encounters 8: From Russia With Love**

Stay Tuned for **Close Encounters 9: Tomorrow Never Dies**

* * *

He couldn't breathe.

And then it came.

A rasp of air in his lungs and the inflation of his chest, too tight and rusty. The exhalation left with a groan, and his eyes dragged open at the sound.

For too long, there was only the nothing that wouldn't resolve. A blankness that wasn't even darkness but just a scrambled sense that something should be coming to him.

The ache behind his eyes was real. The ache sharpened to the agony of an ice pick, and his vision resolved. It was the beige and grey of an Army hospital overseas. Knew that much. That part worked. What else?

A twitching finger let him know it was his own and he turned his head slowly to look. Pain flashed like lightning behind his eyes even though he hadn't closed them, and then it flickered and crashed through the storm clouds of his irises, a layer imprinted over the thin skein of his sight.

His finger. His hand. His arm.

Sensation came back to him too slowly and he let out another breath, forgetting for a moment that he had to work at that too - the in and out of it. The pain in his head seemed to split at his eyes and work its way to his skull, like it was traveling the path of a jagged crack, widening and deepening even as he laid there.

"_Hurts_," croaked out of him, before he even knew he had voice to speak.

And then when the silence came back to him like perverted sonar, a wash of stilted quiet over his body that signified something necessary and dire like _drowning_, Castle fought back the swaddling arms of drugs that seemed to drag him away from that very important _nothing_.

Nothing.

There was nothing.

The beige and grey blurred into the fringe of his lashes and the heavy weight of his eyelids.

He breathed in, sterile and too cold the air. The nothing, the absence, the lack that seemed to ripple with every movement only to be negated by every wave of sedation. He was alone.

He was going.

_kate_

He was gone.


End file.
